


setting fire to our insides (for fun)

by EmmaArthur (EchoBleu)



Series: setting fire to our insides [1]
Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Alex-centric, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Disabled Character, Depression, Detailed warnings in author note, Eating Disorders, Heavy Angst, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Non-Linear Narrative, Or at least hopeful for this part, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Telepathy, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unreliable Narrator, heed the warnings, mindspace
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-06
Updated: 2020-03-28
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:28:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 39,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23040094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EchoBleu/pseuds/EmmaArthur
Summary: Isobel is in the middle of the desert.It doesn't look like the desert around Roswell. In fact, it's not quite any desert. Turning around, she sees that she's on the edge of what looks like a small town. From the shape of the buildings, this isn't anywhere in America.“Iraq,” a voice provides. Isobel jumps, and looks over her shoulder. Alex. Of course. “About a hundred miles outside of Mosul.”“What are we doing here?” Isobel asks. “This is your mindscape. Why did you bring us here?”“I don't know,” Alex shrugs.
Relationships: Alex Manes & Isobel Evans, Alex Manes & Kyle Valenti, Michael Guerin/Alex Manes, Other relationships in the background/mentionned
Series: setting fire to our insides [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1655839
Comments: 192
Kudos: 323





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I've been working on this story for a good while, and I've always planned to have it finished before season 2, but I realized that for that I need to get a move on haha. It's not quite done yet, but a good part of it is, so I'll start posting now and hopefully I'll have it all out by March 16. I'm putting it down as 7 chapters for now, but it could end up being more.
> 
> This story is really important to me because of the themes it takes on, but it's also rough to write, and it's going to be very heavy. It's meant as the first of three parts, and the next two will be much more hopeful, with happy Malex as endgame, but that will take a while to happen. We've doing a deep dive into Alex's psyche, from Isobel's POV, so expect a very non-linear narrative, with an unreliable narrator, and complex mental issues.
> 
> I'm not putting all the warnings in the tags, but I'll make a list here. I'll update it if anything new comes up. Please protect yourself. This goes pretty deep into a whole bunch of traumas and mental issues.
> 
> Title from Youth by Daughter.
> 
> Edit because I somehow forgot: Huge thanks to InsidiousIntent for betaing! She's great 💖
> 
> [semi-graphic homophobic assault (non-sexual), semi-graphic violence, eating disorders, physical and emotional child abuse, PTSD flashbacks, vomiting, injuries, depression, death, suicide ideation, self-hate, serious self-neglect, self-harm mentions of war, bombs, bullying, mentions of canon mind-control and abuse]

Isobel stills her fingers when she realizes she's unconsciously drumming on the kitchen table.

“I need you to stay away, okay?” she says, looking Kyle in the eye. “I know you're worried, but interruptions could make it harder for both of us.”

“Alright,” Kyle sighs. “Just...call if you need anything. I'm staying right here.”

“Don't come in unless I ask you to.”

“What if you can't get out?”

Isobel shakes her head. “It doesn't work like that. I'm putting an alarm on my phone for two hours so I don't lose track of time, but I can't get...lost or anything. I'll be fine.”

Kyle nods, still frowning. Isobel shakes off his worried gaze and stands up straight, taking a deep breath.  _ I can do this _ , she infuses the words into her breathing rhythm.

She doesn't show any hesitation when she steps into the bedroom, clearing her mind the best she can. She pulls a chair from the little desk on the side closer to the bed, eyeing the two IV bags hanging from the headboard and the blood pressure cuff on the nightstand. She places her phone and the two bottles of nail polish remover and water beside it. There's already an empty bucket on the floor, so she pulls it closer.

“Are you still okay to do this?” she asks the nest of blankets in the middle of the bed.

It moves minutely.

“I'm going to need verbal consent,” Isobel says.

“'kay,” comes a weak voice, muffled by the sheets.

“Can I touch you? It would make it easier.”

The bundle doesn't move for a bit, but then a thin, pale hand emerges. Taking it in hers, Isobel can just glimpse a dark eye watching her before it closes again.

“You ready?”

The hand squeezes hers a little. Isobel shifts until she's as comfortable as she's going to get.

“Okay, let's start,” she says.

She closes her eyes, and plunges.

*

Isobel is in the middle of the desert.

It doesn't look like the desert around Roswell. In fact, it's not quite any desert. Turning around, she sees that she's on the edge of what looks like a small town. From the shape of the buildings, this isn't anywhere in America.

“Iraq,” a voice provides. Isobel jumps, and looks over her shoulder. Alex. Of course. “About a hundred miles outside of Mosul.”

“What are we doing here?” Isobel asks. “This is your mindscape. Why did you bring us here?”

“I don't know,” Alex shrugs.

He stands a few feet away from her, in civilian clothes, looking healthy and tan. Isobel can't tell if his leg is flesh or prosthetic, not with his pants pulled down.

She can't feel the sun bearing down on her, can't hear any birds or town noises, can't smell−whatever this town half a world away might smell like. This is just a projection, and she's got her shield up. She's inside Alex's mind, but he's not inside hers.

Alex looks down, and she follows suit. They're standing on...ruins, of some kind. A building, collapsed and partly burned down. A bomb, she thinks.

“I almost died here,” Alex says, dreamily. “Or maybe I did die here.”

“This is where you...got injured?” Isobel asks. The picture takes a green, sickly tint, but she doesn't know if Alex is doing that or if it's her own feelings coming through. Damn. She should control this better. She needs to be in control here, if she wants to achieve anything.

“I was trapped for seventeen hours,” Alex says. “It's not a long time, if you think about it. Not even a full day. Two thirds of a day. Such a short time.”

The landscape tilts a little. “It didn't feel short.”

“I can imagine,” Isobel murmurs. She doesn't know why she's trying to pretend this is a normal conversation. Would Alex share this with her, out there? Where she can sense his every thought?

“Can you?”

Isobel closes her eyes. “No. You want to show me?”

Alex shakes his head. “You don't want to see it.”

“Isn't that what we're here for?”

“Not really. I've been in therapy for that. This...mindscape, or whatever you call it, it's too strong, I think. You don't need that memory in your head.”

There's a glimpse, though, that comes through Isobel's shield. Dust making her cough. The slickness of blood. Pain, worse than she's ever felt. Alex shakes his head again and shuts it down before it gets any more intense. He won't let her see more than that. “I only have flashes, anyway. It's fuzzy.”

“Okay. So, how do we do this?”

“I don't know,” Alex shrugs. “It's your power.”

“I can go digging,” Isobel says. “But I won't last long, not if you're not coming along. If you show me things, we can jump from memory to memory by association.”

“Where do we start?”

“That's your call. The assault, maybe? Can you show me what happened?”

Alex looks vaguely disturbed. “I guess I'm not coming out of this with my pride intact, am I?” he drawls out. “Hell, who am I kidding? I don't imagine any of you think very highly of me at the moment.”

“It's not your fault. I don't think less of you because you're struggling.”

“You're only here because you pity me.”

Isobel sighs. “You know that's not true. If it really helps, think of it as an exchange of services. You helped me when I needed it. I'm helping you now.”

“Right,” Alex says, sarcasm heavy in his voice. Isobel keeps her gaze level, and he sighs after a moment. “Sorry. I hate feeling vulnerable.”

“I know. Unfortunately, it looks like the only way out is through.”

Alex doesn't believe there's a way out, not yet. He knows Isobel knows that. There's no hiding anything, not here.

“The assault,” he mutters. “That was...three days ago?”

“Six.”

“Six.” Alex lets out a shaky breath. “Okay. I was at the Pony.”

Isobel lets him guide her. He's navigating his own mind easily, in the way only people with strong compartmentalization skills can. She's been in many minds, over the years. This is the most organized mind she's ever seen. And it’s like this _after_ a dozen mental tornadoes wrecked it, so she wonders what it looked like beforehand. She knows the scars are there, but they’re well hidden.

Alex is the kind of person who will stand up before the wind is even gone to start cleaning up, with the ease of someone who's done it so many times he knows the broom closet by heart. She wonders where she'll find all the broken glass. It has to go somewhere.

It makes her want to cry.

The parking lot of the Pony is quiet, though the bar isn't. It's that moment just in between day and night, when the light isn't completely gone from the sky yet, but it's becoming harder to see.

The memory isn't clear, though. It surrounds them in the mindspace, but it's nothing like the desert, it's patchy and in-and-out. They're here in the curious way that Isobel has always experienced memories and dreams, seeing through Alex's eyes but also not, seeing _him_ as he's aware of himself in that moment and in retrospect. It would be confusing as hell, if Isobel wasn't well-practiced, if it wasn't Alex's own memory.

Alex is leaning against a car−his car, Isobel thinks. Present-Alex confirms with a nod. He has his head bowed and the tension in his body is obvious, would be even if Isobel didn't feel the pain. It's only the memory of the pain, far less than it must have been at the time, because it always is. Pain, the true intensity of it, is the first thing you forget.

Though in this case, untangling it from the pain Alex is feeling right now is proving hard. Isobel tried to localize it before the memory moves on, but it's like her whole body is on fire. No, Alex's body. Hers, too, for now.

“Stomach cramp,” Alex explains. “I was trying to ride it out.”

“Your leg hurts too. Hell, your whole body.”

“It was a bad day. But not that bad. I made it to the Pony.”

Isobel closes her eyes, and pushes the pain away. However much she empathizes, there's no point in her feeling it. It's only going to hold her back.

It recedes to more of a buzzing. Alex beside her is impassible, and memory-Alex is still gritting his teeth.

“Why were you there?”

“I went to see Maria,” Alex answers. Immediately, their surroundings start changing to the inside of the Pony.

“Whoa, slow down,” Isobel stops it. “You were telling me about the assault.”

Alex closes his eyes, struggling to focus. His compartmentalization may be impressive, but he's in a very vulnerable place right now. He may appear healthy and fit here, but that's just a projection.

Isobel feels an echo of real life perceptions, of his bony hand in hers in the physical world. Alex shudders and almost blinks out, but she catches it on time. “Alex.”

“Sorry.”

“No, that was me. Tell me. Who attacked you?”

“Some of Maria's regulars,” Alex answers as the parking lot reforms. “She found a body here, around when Max died, and all that. Noah's last kill, I believe.”

Isobel nods, swallowing. This is too close for comfort. Her own memories of that night are nearly incomprehensible, with Noah getting in and out of her mind. She doesn't know for sure if he used her body for this one or not. She never asked.

“The guy's friend have been hanging around, periodically harassing people since then. Maria has them thrown out, but they'll beat random people up and rob them. They say they want to find the murderer.”

“How do you even know all this?”

Alex shrugs. “Maria told me. She's called the cops on them a dozen times, but they're always gone by the time someone shows up.”

“Why you though?”

“Back when Maria first said something, I went out with her bouncer one night. It was before I was discharged and I happened to be in fatigues, so they backed off and I warned them not to come back. They only assault certain people. Those who are alone, and not white. Or women. Older people. You don't actually want to see this,” Alex grabs her arm.

Isobel is shocked out of her morbid fascination, watching four men encircle Alex, calling out names. “They know who you are,” she says.

“Kurt was in school with us. A few years ahead of us, he was in my brother's class. Friend of his, actually. He remembered I was the gay kid, apparently.”

The insults have turns decidedly homophobic. Alex looks dazed and resigned, like he knows he's not going to escape this. He doesn't even try. He's at a serious disadvantage, on one leg against four men. That's not counting how his hands are shaking, how he looks like he could be blown by the wind like a leaf.

Present-Alex laughs self-deprecatingly. “That's how far I've fallen. Once, I would have taken them all, and barely broken a sweat. Hell, even a few months ago. They're untrained, bar brawlers. I didn't need two legs.”

Isobel actually has to look away after the first blow. Alex doesn't even try to defend himself. His present projection watches calmly, like he can't feel the pain of every kick.

And then the memory overlays with another, several others. Flashes of other places, always the same version of Alex, and yet the strange, memory-specific knowledge of him being younger, a teenager in an abusive home, standing in front of a larger, angry man, falling, falling, lying on the floor and weathering the blows.

Isobel throws up.

She's back in the dark bedroom, retching in the bucket. Alex's pale hand has a cut just above the base of the thumb that she hadn't noticed. He doesn't move, his fingers shaking slightly.

She's never seen what a flashback looks like in the mindspace before.

She gingerly prods her ribs, finding them completely fine−she battles with the urge to check that her leg is still there.

“I'm sorry,” she mutters, taking one hand off his to wipe her mouth. She doesn't let go of him as she grabs the open water bottle and takes a swig to get rid of the taste. It doesn't work. It follows her back into the mindspace.

“Don't be,” Alex welcomes her back. “They're gone.”

Isobel looks at him in surprise, then back at the car. Alex is lying curled up on the floor, alone.

He's controlling this better than he should. Better than she thought possible, for someone who doesn't know how to do what she does.

“We should, um, fast-forward,” Alex says with something like embarrassment in his voice.

Isobel frowns at his immobile form by the car. “You're hurt.”

“It's gonna take a while. There's nothing to see, anyway,” Alex decides. Isobel pulls before he can push away the memory.

“No. I control this, remember? That's how it works. I'll respect your wishes if you don't want to show me something, but you can't pull away. It won't do any good.”

Alex closes his eyes in defeat. “Right. I don't know what we can...if we can get anywhere. Maybe there's nothing to be done.”

“Alex.” Isobel waits until he looks up at her again. “Let me try.”

“Okay,” Alex nods shakily. The memory shakes with him, but it holds true. “We should...we should settle in for a while, then.”

“Time doesn't pass the same way here. We won't get tired of standing, or anything like that.”

Alex crosses his arms, more in protection than in disagreement. The knot in Isobel's throat grows as they watch Alex lay on the floor. He's conscious. He's feeling everything. He tries to move a few times, but he just falls back down.

He's out of sight from the bar entrance, so no one takes notice. “You didn't have your phone?” Isobel asks.

“No, I did,” Alex shrugs.

“Why didn't you call anyone?”

He just gives her a look.

After what feels both like hours and seconds, Alex finally picks himself up. Doubled over, one arm pressed to his chest, he gathers his crutches and his keys and gets in the car.

“You don't look safe to drive,” Isobel remarks.

Alex laughs darkly. “I'm aware.”

He makes it to his cabin somehow, pulling over twice on the way to wipe blood from his left eye−there's a cut above his eyebrow−and try to breathe through the pain of his broken ribs. Isobel bites hard on her tongue not to say anything, because a running commentary would not help Alex, nor would a plea to get some help. It's a memory. It's done. Alex doesn't need to be scolded like a child, even if she wants to shake him.

They both watch him stumble into his cabin, unstable on his crutches. By the time he makes it to his bed, it's clear that there's no way he'll be able to give himself first care. He just removes his shoes and his pants and does his best to check on his bleeding stump.

“Why didn't you have the prosthesis?” Isobel asks the question that has been bothering her for a while. When they first started to hang out, it took weeks for Alex to trust her enough to remove his leg in front of her.

“I haven't been able to put it on in weeks,” Alex explains. “Prosthesis fitting is delicate. From the moment I started losing weight, it didn't fit properly anymore. I made do with different linings and socks for a while, but at some point it just wasn't worth it anymore.”

In the memory, Alex curls up on the bed. The cut over his eyebrow has finally stopped bleeding, but his stump smears red on the sheets. Buffy yaps at him, uncomprehending, nudging his good leg to no avail. He lets out a low moan.

He moves so little that it takes Isobel several moments to realize that he's crying.

*

In a blink, she's back in the desert. Alex is stoic by her−embarrassed, she can feel that, but his emotions are tightly coiled even here. What pours out most is disgust, spite for his own state. For himself.

“This wasn't the starting point at all, was it?” Isobel asks, struggling to stay standing. The fitness of her physical body may not bother her here, but the weight of her spirit does. She swallows. “Just the proverbial straw.”

Alex shrugs. “I should have called Kyle, done something. I let it go too far.”

“Yeah, you did. But I don't think you were in any state to think.”

“I should have−” Alex continues nervously, like Isobel hasn't said anything.

“Alex.”

He looks up at her and, for a fleeting second, actually meets her eyes.

“This is _not_ your fault.”

Alex bodily turns away−as much as it's possible in a shared mindspace. “I know what it looks like, Isobel,” he says, using her name for the first time, as though he's retaking control. It's a flimsy grasp. “I'm the fucking _victim_ of a homophobic assault. You can even add racist and ableist to the list. What, am I a fucking list of vulnerabilities right now?” He's nearly screaming now, finally breaking and showing real emotions. “I _know_. I'm also a trained Airman, and I didn't even try to defend myself,” he says in a quieter tone.

“You were in a bad state−”

“I'm a grown man who can't eat or sleep or even fucking stand up right now, Isobel. I know I'm a running list of mental illnesses, okay? What do you want me to tell you?”

Isobel stands her ground, reminding herself that he's the one who asked her to do this. “That it's not your fault,” she says.

Alex stumbles, and brutally sits down on the ground. “Then why does it feel so much like it is?”

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you liked this first chapter! Every single comment makes my day, and I would really love to know what you think. Any theories about what's going on?


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is not quite as heavy as the first one, but it's a glimpse at how complicated and disjointed things will get.
> 
> I will probably posting every day from now on, at least I should if I want to post it all before season 2!

Isobel gives Alex some time to recover, sitting as close to him as she dares in the mindspace. She takes the time to recenter herself, to avoid having to brutally pull out to throw up. Alex's mind is not an easy place to be in. If she's not careful, she'll do more damage than good.

“Let's go look somewhere else, okay? How did it all start?”

Alex pauses. “I don't even know what 'all' of it is.”

“Coming back to Roswell last year, you were at least...functioning, right?”

“More or less, I suppose. To be honest, I don't know how much of that was that I never let myself slow down. I went from the hospital to rehab to back to work without a break.”

“The hospital. Would you say it started when you got injured?”

“Maybe. I don't know. The first month or so was really bad, but...I got better. I was...okay.”

Yet as Alex says that, the desert whitens, shrinks around them, changing into what Isobel quickly recognizes as a hospital room. The image has a strange quality to it, like the edges are blurred, the sounds slightly muffled. “Morphine,” Alex explains. “I mostly slept through the first week. This was in Germany, just before I got shipped back.”

Isobel recognizes Alex, once again both seeing him from the outside and from the inside. He's barely in any pain, but he feels sluggish, slow. She tries to keep her involuntary shock at his appearance to her own mind, but she's not completely successful.

He's propped up in the bed, a brace around his neck and his left arm in a sling, abrasions and bruises the only color on his face. His heavily bandaged stump is elevated on a pillow, and Isobel can _feel_ the utter wrongness of it, of the foot that's so obviously missing but still there every time he closes his eyes, the nausea at the very thought of his leg being gone. “It takes a while to adjust,” Alex says simply.

“I didn't realize you had more injuries,” Isobel says, trying to focus on something else.

“Some torn muscles in my shoulder and a broken vertebra. All in all, I got off fairly lightly, given how close I came to dying.” Alex's face shuts off at that, though Isobel can't quite discern why. The emotional pain radiating out of memory-Alex is too strong to tell the subtleties.

The memory is so blurred that Isobel only notices the man and woman sitting by Alex when they talk, after what seems like a long silence. All three have their head down. “There will be a  Purple Heart  ceremony,” the woman says. “For you and them. We'll be given l eave for that.”

Alex swallows. “When are you leaving?”

“In a couple of days.”

“Who are they?” Isobel asks.

“Two of the four Airmen who went in that building with me,” present-Alex answers. “Javis and Sfar. Their injuries were minor, so they were shipped back out to Fallujah right away.”

_ A nd the other two? _ Isobel almost asks, but she understands even before she opens her mouth. Her thoughts aren't fully private here, though, and Alex sees her realization on her face.

“Dawson and Karl didn't make it out. I only got lucky because I was on the second floor, so it didn't all collapse on me. Javis and Sfar were standing guard, so they only caught the edge of the blast.” Alex says it all in a monotone voice, looking away from her. “I should have died.”

The landscape changes back to the desert and it takes Alex with it. It's so sudden that Isobel takes a panicked step forward, and she finds him lying on the floor, his leg gone. A switch in his perception of himself.

“I still try to step on it before I put the prosthesis on more days than not,” Alex says absently. He sits up and brings his left knee up to his chest. “I can feel it. Like it's still there. But it's not. And Dawson and Karl, they're still gone. It's been a year and...” he chokes up. “They didn't deserve this.”

“People don't usually deserve to die,” Isobel says. She's aware of how callous it sounds, but that's her first thought. The second is _except maybe Noah_ and she's glad that Alex is too distracted to hear.

“I don't understand why I came home and they didn't,” Alex says.

“What do you mean?”

“Dawson and Karl, they had families who loved them. Dawson had a little girl, she couldn't shut up about her, how she'd make it home just in time for her birthday and she was going to spoil her rotten. I...I don't have anyone. If I had died out there, there wouldn't have been anyone who'd miss me. Not really.”

“Alex, you're valuable to a lot of people−”

“Yeah, valuable. Because of my skills, or my connections, sure. I'm useful to the Air Force. To you and your brothers, to some extent. But I don't have children, or a wife or a...husband, I don't have a family… I don't think my brothers would miss me much, and my father would probably have preferred I died out there than keep humiliating him here.”

“What about your friends?” Isobel prompts, since his mind doesn't even seem to go there.

Alex tilts his head. “Kyle...maybe now he'd miss me, I don't know. Not back then, we hadn't talked then.”

“What about Liz? Maria?”

“Liz and I didn't speak for ten years,” Alex shrugs. “With Maria, we emailed once in a while, but I doubt I'd get a shrine on the Wild Pony's billboard.”

“I think you would, Alex,” Isobel says sadly. “I can't speak for them, but I think they'd miss you. And for what it's worth, I definitely would.”

“No,” Alex shakes his head. “I helped you a little through a rough time, and you...got attached. But it's not real.”

“Are you saying we're not friends?”

“I'm saying you don't have to−you _shouldn't_ think of me as a friend.”

Isobel hates the hitch in her breath. “And _I_ think that for once, I should be the one to decide who I want to call a friend,” she replies icily.

Alex's eyes briefly widen in surprise, then he closes them, taking a shaky breath. “You're right,” he says through gritted teeth. “Of course.”

Isobel is taken aback. Maybe she's too used to her brothers' assertiveness, but she expected a backlash. She expected to get _something_ out of Alex that isn't apathy or anguish. But he simply doesn't seem to have that much fight left in him. “I know you didn't mean it that way,” she says more gently. “I'm just done letting other people control my life. You're my friend and I care about you, Alex. Nothing you or someone else says will change that.”

Alex laughs bitterly. “Yeah, I'm not sure you'll still say that when we're done here.”

“Are you trying to make me change my mind?” Isobel asks, raising her eyebrows. “Is that a challenge?”

There's a quick flash of something in Alex's eyes, though it's gone as fast as it comes. Isobel  grasps at it, filing it into her memory.  _This_ is what they need to find. This is what needs to come out. She'll go to the deepest recess of Alex's mind if she has to,  but she'll dig it out.

On this night blue, pulsating slab of _will_ , they can rebuild.

*

Alex doesn't know how he f inds himself holding everyone together, while pretending to ignore the singular ways they each resent him for who he i s .  He's the only one not grieving, when the dust settles. Max is dead, and his siblings and Liz are each pulling themselves apart in different directions. Michael lost his mom in Caulfield, before he even got to meet her. Maria is giving up on her last hopes of helping Mimi, while trying to handle the reality of aliens, of her best friend coming back to life, and Rosa is mourning ten years of her life and a father. Kyle has to come to terms with the fact that his father was complicit in the long term imprisonment and torture of people and that he was murdered by his friend.

Alex, on the other hand, is  _fine_ .  He hasn't lost anyone−can you lose someone you never had in the first place?−he's actually got a few friends back, even if it's awkward, and his father is harmless in the hospital.

So, he reasons, it falls to him to keep everyone else from falling apart.

“That's sounds like one hell of a fallacious argument,” Isobel points out. Because Alex is enough of a nerd−of a neurotic person−to have actually written all that down on his little work notebook.

Present-Alex laughs darkly. “I was certainly trying to convince myself.”

“You've been through so much trauma that you can't recognize it when it happens to you,” Isobel breathes, because it's easy. She's there, in his mind, she's got all the facts at her disposal. She can look at it all with enough distance to see what Alex missed.

“But those few months, you all went through so much−”

“So did you. Only, you pushed through and you didn't let yourself feel it. And that was after you pushed through losing your leg and half your unit. You've never actually _dealt_ with anything, Alex, it's not that surprising that it all came to a head.”

A lex sighs. “When did you get all sponsor?”

“I've been reading up, since Noah and all that. It's been useful. Plus in here, I'm very clairvoyant, it comes with the territory.”

“Then you can tell me where I went wrong,” Alex says.

*

“We have to find some kind of solution,” Alex hears Liz says, as he approaches Max's house where the Ortecho sisters have been hiding. It's been a week since Max died and somehow brought Rosa back to life−and isn't that a shock. Alex isn't faint of heart, but he had to sit down when Liz called him to tell him the news.

“A solution to what?” he asks, walking over to them.

“How to let Rosa show her face again. Everyone in Roswell knows she's dead, and even if they didn't, she's still nineteen,” Liz answers. She's sitting on the couch, and Rosa is, for some reason, sitting crossed-legged on the floor.

Liz looks beyond tired, her hair in disarray, her eyes red like she has cried recently. Alex isn't sure she's stopped crying since Max died.

“You could pass her off as a second cousin or something,” Alex says. “It would explain the resemblance. Maybe you could cut your hair, die it?” he asks Rosa.

“Urgh,” Rosa makes a face. “Fine. If I have to.”

“Have you told Arturo yet?” Alex asks.

“No,” Liz answers. “Michael and Isobel don't want us to−”

“I still don't see why they have a say in this. This is all their fault!” Rosa exclaims.

Liz sighs. “We will tell Dad, but I want to solve the identity issue first. You need papers of some kind, at least.”

“You know what? Let me handle it,” Alex says. “Forging papers isn't that hard. I know people. With a little bit of hacking, I can even make them hold up to a background check.”

“You can do that?” There's admiration in Rosa's eyes, which is better than the strange distance with which she's treated him so far, the two times he's seen her. She looks even more like a teenager, though, and Alex winces internally at that.

“Yeah, I can do that,” he smiles.

“Uh, do you think you could do some for Dad too?” Rosa asks.

Liz opens her mouth to protest, but Alex nods. “I could, yes. That would make things easier for him, right?”

“Dad will never take a fake ID,” Liz says.

“Maybe he will if he's worried about people looking into Rosa,” Alex points out. “Otherwise, you can hang on to it just in case.”

Liz thinks about it, then nods. “Thank you.”

“You're welcome.” Alex would do so much more to help her, if he could. But the Project Shepard files aren't yielding anything that could bring Max back, so if something as small as spending a few days making Rosa and Arturo some IDs can help, he'll do it gladly.

Liz's phone starts ringing, and Alex can see Michael's name on the screen. He swallows. Michael hasn't talked to _him_ since the night he went to the Airstream. “I need to take it,” Liz says. “You too okay here?”

“Of course,” Rosa shrugs. “It's Alex.”

Liz looks at each of them for a moment before she stands up to leave the room.

“How is she doing?” Alex asks Rosa quietly once she's gone.

“Not great. She tries to pretend she's okay for me, but she spends a lot of time in Max's bedroom crying.”

Alex sits down where Liz was, removing his arm from the cuff of his crutch and laying it down on the floor under the couch. “How are _you_ doing?”

“Still trying to get used to all of you being ten years older,” Rosa says.

“It must be quite an adjustment,” Alex acknowledges.

“You could say that. At least Liz did what she was supposed to do. More or less.”

“What do you mean?”

Rosa shrugs. “I feel like the rest of you just...this is not where you all saw yourselves. Maria was supposed to travel, eventually. You were supposed to play music. What happened to that, Alex?”

“My father happened,” Alex sighs. He realizes, vaguely, that he's never even acknowledged that to anyone other than Michael. He may have made the choice to enlist, but by then the options he had left had been drastically reduces by his father.

“You enlisted,” Rosa says with something like disgust in her voice.

“I enlisted,” Alex repeats neutrally.

“You swore you never would.”

“I grew up.”

“Fuck that, Alex! It's not about being an adult! You deserved so much better than that!”

Alex recoils at her outbreak. He wants to defend himself, maybe, like he's been attacked, but he can see where she's coming from. From Rosa's perspective, he gave up on all his dreams to follow his father's footsteps.

He can't even say that she's wrong.

“You're so sad,” she whispers. “It's like they sucked out your soul.”

Alex looks down at his lap, vaguely ashamed. “The Air Force didn't do that,” he murmurs.

“You had so much spirit, Alex, so much strength. I envied you that, you know?”

Alex wants to scream, for how broken they all are. For the wasted time and the wasted lives. “I looked up to you,” he says. “I wanted to be like you. I thought you were so free.”

“I wasn't,” Rosa murmurs.

“I know that now. I told you, I grew up.”

A tear falls down Rosa's cheek. With a sigh, she stands up and comes to sit next to him. Alex opens his arm to her and she curls up at his side.

“What's the crutch for?” she asks after a while.

Alex has been wondering how long it would take her to ask. He's been using it on and off since Caulfield and sitting outside Michael's Airstream did a number on his leg, but this is the first time Rosa sees it.

“I got injured on my last tour,” he says.

“Like a knee injury?” Rosa frowns. “You didn't have the crutch the other day.”

How is this somehow worse than explaining his injury to anyone else? Is it because they've just been talking about the past, the dreams they've let go of?

Rather than explaining, Alex reaches down to roll up his pant leg. Rosa hisses in shock at the sight of the prosthesis. “Fuck.”

“Yeah,” Alex sighs.

“How long?”

“It will be a year in January.”

“Fuck.”

Alex thinks that it's maybe the most appropriate reaction anyone's had to his injury. Much better than the pity and the meaningless “thank you for you service”−he remembers, suddenly, that Liz tried that one with him. Maria just hugged him.

“I'm okay,” he says.

Rosa lets out a small sound, almost a squeak, and he realizes she's now crying freely. Alex brings her closer in a hug.

“Everything's so different,” she sobs in his shoulder.

“I know,” Alex murmurs. “I know.”

*

“I feel like I'm intruding on something private,” Isobel says. “Rosa's still mostly avoiding me, and now I feel like I know nothing about her. I know we're here to see your memories, but−”

“Sorry,” Alex mutters. “I don't even know why we're here.”

“You were thinking about her? Did something else happen with her? Or with Liz?”

“Not really,” Alex shrugs. “I tried to help Liz as much as I could, so Kyle and I mostly took over getting Rosa settled. It was better once they told Arturo.”

Isobel frowns at his uneasiness. “There's something else,” she says.

Alex takes a breath. “I think maybe Rosa was the first to see that I wasn't...doing well.”

*

They don't really have a party to celebrate Max's return, because Max's energy is so depleted that he spends most of his days sleeping. But Isobel and Michael still invite all the humans who know about them one evening, to toast to his health and celebrate the fact that things are finally settling down.

Alex almost doesn't go. It's a bad pain day, but it falls just two weeks after his official discharge from the Air Force, and he's still feeling unsettled by not having to go to work in the morning, so he decides that it might do him good to see people. He's been working nearly non-stop in the Project Shepard bunker, so it might get Kyle off his back, too.

He quickly realizes what a bad idea it was. He can't take his mind off his work. The surveillance videos haunt him even here, especially here where he has to look the three live aliens in the eye and try not to think about how his family tortured and killed theirs. There are drinks and junk food, and he turns both down, his stomach unsettled by pain meds and pain and the utter horror of live dissections. 

Liz and Isobel are all over Max, trying to do everything for him as he sits slouched on the couch. Alex gives him his best wishes and a couple of tips on how to survive with limited mobility and energy, but that's all he can stand before he makes a tactical retreat to the patio.

Except the patio is housing Michael and Maria. They're not kissing, thank God, but they're standing close to each other and whispering. Alex feels his heart go to his throat, and he backs away before they can see him, heading for the kitchen instead.

“Something's going on with Alex,” Rosa is saying when he gets to the corridor. Alex halts his step, almost unwillingly. She's talking to Liz, and both of them have their back to the door, preparing nachos.

“What makes you say that?” Liz asks.

“He's...I don't know, sad. He's not eating, and he's trying to become a shadow or something, he keeps trying to fade into the background.”

Alex is surprised that she noticed. He's not even doing it on purpose, but groups of people feel like too much, so he takes a step back, almost unconsciously.

“I'm sure he's fine,” Liz shrugs. “I didn't notice anything off.”

Rosa shakes her head. “No, there's something.”

“He's...he's changed, Rosa. I think that's what you're seeing, he's not _our_ Alex anymore. The war made him a different person.”

“He's not that different!” Rosa protests.

“I barely recognize him,” Liz says.

Alex reels at the blow. He closes his eyes, saddened. He's not sure what Liz sees in him, these days, but she hasn't got over the ten years they've spent apart, the ways that they've grown. She's still awkward around his leg, and their friendship is simply not what it once was.

Maybe if it was, she would have remembered that she and Maria promised to celebrate his discharge properly, back before she found a lead on how to bring back Max.

He shrugs it all off, and finally walks in. “You girls need any help?” he asks. He's not comfortable pretending he hasn't heard their conversation, but he doesn't want the guilt, real or not, that Liz is sure to show if he tells her.

“Alex!” Rosa jumps at his neck. 

Alex forces himself not to flinch. “Hey, Rosa. What's up?”

“You need to cheer up! Do you still like nachos?”

“Sure,” Alex says, swallowing the bile rising in his mouth. He can't stand the thought of eating right now. “Maybe a bit later, though. I'm not really hungry.”

He feels Rosa's worried eyes on him, and Liz's pensive gaze. “Are you sure you're okay, Alex?” Liz asks.

“I'm fine. I'm happy that Max is back,” Alex purposefully derails the conversation.

“Yeah, I don't know why my sister fell in love with _Max Evans_ ,” Rosa says. “He's just as boring now as he was ten years ago!”

“He's an alien, that's not boring,” Alex says, trying hard not to think about Michael on the patio.

“What's with you two and aliens, uh?”

“Me?” Alex raises his eyebrows.

“You and Guerin. Come on, Alex, I have eyes.”

Alex sputters. Liz doesn't look surprised, so he turns to her. “Maria kind of told me,” she says with a grimace.

Right. So Maria told Liz and Liz told Rosa. Great.

“Michael is with Maria,” he says, his tone as final as he can make it.

“You're not okay with that,” Liz states.

Alex closes his eyes in dismay. It's the last thing he wants to discuss with Liz, who has probably talked at length with Maria about her new wonderful relationship.

“It's what they want,” he says through gritted teeth.

Liz sighs. “I'm sorry, Alex.”

“I don't want to talk about it. I need to go,” Alex flees. He doesn't bother with an excuse. It doesn't matter. “Tell Max and Isobel goodnight for me.”

“Alex, wait−” Liz calls behind him, but he's already through the door.

He can't handle anymore of this. He should have stayed in the bunker with his Caulfield surveillance footage.

*

“Michael,” Isobel notes. “He's somewhere at the root of all this, isn't he?”

Alex paces the floor of the desert, restless. “He's not the cause of it,” he says firmly. “That's all me. Michael doesn't owe me anything.”

“That's not what I was saying,” Isobel points out. “But you _do_ love him.”

Alex doesn't answer, but she doesn't need him to. “Let's take that break,” she says. “I probably need to go barf, and you need to rest.”

Alex nods minutely. “Don't−” he starts, then he hesitates.

“Don't what?”

“Don't let me stop this. There are things...things that are too hard to remember. But this isn't going to go anywhere if we stop at the first hurdle. Don't let me.”

“Are you sure?” Isobel asks.

“I know it's asking a lot, and you should stop if _you_ feel too uncomfortable, but don't let me back out of this.”

Isobel nods, because there's this brief sliver of  _fight_ again. “Okay. I won't.”

“Thank you,” Alex murmurs.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a bit of an interlude, centering around Isobel's relationship with Alex, so it's a little different from the rest of the story. I hope you like it!
> 
> Specific CWs for this chapter: graphic description of a panic attack, mentions of PTSD nightmares and dissociation, insomnia, discussion of canonical abuse (mostly Noah), mourning of an abuser, mentions of EDs, mental illnesses, injuries, psychiatric care and involuntary commitment, meds.

Isobel knocks on the door of the cabin. She's been there a few times, before Max was resurrected, when she couldn't stand the thought of sleeping at either her house or her brother's. Alex never once turned her down, he even went out of his way to help her deal with the dissociation episodes and the nightmares when he could.

She expects Alex to be the one who greets her, even if Kyle called her here, but Kyle is the one who opens the door. He looks tired and unkempt. Isobel makes to greet him, but he holds up a hand. “Let's take this outside,” he says.

“Why?” Isobel frowns.

“Alex is sleeping. I don't want to wake him up.”

“Then why would you ask me here?”

Kyle steps outside and closes the door behind him. Buffy follows him, yapping and sniffling Isobel's legs. “I'll explain. Let's just go sit down, okay?”

Isobel obeys, still confused. She doesn't know Kyle all that well, even if they worked together a little on the race to resurrect Max. If he called her, if he asked her to come her, it has to mean something is wrong with Alex.

“When was the last time you saw Alex?” Kyle asks once they're seated in the lounge chairs at the back of the cabin, all but confirming her fears.

Isobel thinks about it. “I'm not sure, it's been a few weeks,” she says. “We've texted, though.” Less than usual, Isobel realizes. She's been busy with work and trying to handle the paperwork for her inheritance from Noah, so she didn't think anything of it, but Alex hasn't initiated a conversation in a while. He sounded normal in the few texts he did send, but Isobel know how easy it is to pretend. “What's wrong?”

Kyle sighs. “I don't even know where to start.”

“Is he sick? Hurt?”

“Both, but it's more complicated than that. I...I came here yesterday and found him unable to get up.”

Isobel blinks. “Is it his leg?”

“No, not exactly,” Kyle sighs again. “He was, uh, attacked last Saturday, apparently. Some thugs, he won't tell me more. He got a couple of broken ribs and some damage to his stump, nothing life threatening, but he didn't go to the hospital or even treat it properly.”

“So he, what, got an infection?”

“He had a small one, but I managed to get the fever under control. But that's not what's really worrying.” Kyle shifts uncomfortably.

Isobel tries to wait him out, but it's getting ridiculous. “Come on, Kyle, what is it?”

He bites his lip. “I don't feel comfortable just telling you, but I think I have to. It looks like he hasn't been taking care of himself at all since he was discharged, and with all that's happened...he's really not okay. He hasn't been sleeping, and he's dangerously underweight. He's not eating, and barely drinking, it's like he just...can't. Like a block of some kind, the little bit he manages to eat he just throws up. He's not going to last long like this.”

Isobel bites her lip before she can let her shock through. “Fuck,” she murmurs.  This is much worse than she imagined.  She takes a few breaths, looking away at the desert. In the last few months, Alex has truly become a friend. But more than that, his current struggles resonate with her deeply. “Why am I here?” she asks.

“He won't go to a hospital. He won't even let me call any of his friends. I ran him through everyone I know, you're the only person he said I could call.”

“But why?”

“You'll have to ask him that,” Kyle says, looking curious. “He didn't tell me. Just that you might be able to help.

“Help?”

“Look, I'm this close to having him committed against his will, but I don't want to do that to him. So anything that could help him get better is more than welcome.”

Isobel bites her lip, trying to think of any way she could help Alex. She's ready to do what he did for her, to hold him through nightmares and bring him back from panic attacks, but this sounds like he needs more than that.

“I'll do whatever I can,” she says anyway. “Can I...can I see him?”

“Yeah. It's his house, he invited you,” Kyle says. “I don't think he's really sleeping, but he's very weak, so he tires easily. Don't...be gentle, all right?”

“Are you sure that's what he needs?” Isobel asks.

“I think it's the only thing he can handle right now.”

Isobel closes her eyes sadly and nods. “I'll be careful.”

She doesn't need Kyle to lead her to Alex's bedroom. The cabin is not large, and she's slept in the guest room before. She knocks lightly, hoping that it won't wake Alex up if he's truly asleep.

“Come in,” comes a rasp. It barely sounds like Alex at all.

Isobel opens the door, and she takes in a sharp breath when she sees Alex. He's sitting on his bed, his back against the headboard, his shoulders slumped and his head down. He looks up a little at her entrance, and his face is paler and thinner than she even thought possible, the angry bruises covering the right side in sharp contrast with his skin. He has one hand pressed against his ribs, and the other tangled in the sheets, an IV needle taped to his forearm.

He doesn't meet Isobel's gaze, and his eyes fall back to his lap the moment he's confirmed who she is, though he tenses up.

“Can I sit down?” Isobel asks, trying to lead with something as practical as possible.

Alex nods curtly, without looking up again. Isobel makes her movements small and smooth, telegraphing her intentions clearly, and she sits down in the small desk chair that has been pulled close to his bed. “Kyle called me,” she says.

“I know,” Alex answers. His voice is more of a whisper, but Isobel doesn't think he can speak louder that this right now. He has a hoodie and several blankets covering him, but his lips are still tinted blue, and his hands are shaking. He looks...frail.

Isobel tries to think of something to say. The obvious conversation starters all seem moot or inappropriate. “I'm glad that he did, but why me?” she settles on. She doesn't think Alex could handle small talk, not with the lines of pain on his face and the way his eyelids are dropping. And she's pretty sure that's not what he asked for her for, either.

Alex takes a breath. “I...I need help. Something that Kyle can't do.” He coughs, wincing in pain, and struggles to sit up more.  “After... Noah, and Max , I helped you because I could, and because I knew something of what you were going through. I don't expect anything in return, it isn't an exchange, but I was hoping that you could−”

“Of course,” Isobel answers when Alex trails off. “Anything I can do.”

“I'm aware of how bad I let things get,” Alex says sadly. “I tried to ignore it and it got out of hand. But if I go to the hospital now, or even to a therapist, they'll probably just section me. Even Kyle wants that.”

“I'm sure it's not what he wants, Alex. He thinks you probably need it, though, and...” Isobel gestures helplessly. “Would it be so bad? It could help.”

Alex gives her a look.

“My own experience doesn't count,” Isobel rolls her eyes. “It obviously couldn't do anything against Noah.”

“Kyle also kept you from being pumped full of meds,” Alex says. “Which they will certainly do to me. I don't really think that will help. But I gave him my word that if there's no other choice, I'll let him take me to the hospital.”

Isobel nods, reserving her thoughts for herself. After forcing herself into Kyle's mind to make him give her a serum that almost killed her, she hardly has a leg to stand on when it comes to criticizing anyone's medical decisions. “What are you thinking about?”

“Your...power. You can see people's memories, right? Share them?”

“Yes. I can sort of go into your mind and see what you're seeing, or pull you into mine.”

“When I was in mandatory therapy after my injury, one thing that actually helped was when my therapist made me relive memories, figure out what the triggers were bringing up and make the connections that my brain wasn't making on its own. Back then we focused on my time overseas only, we left the rest alone, but a more...aggressive form of that might help.”

“You want me to help you relive your traumas,” Isobel states, turning the idea in her mind.

“It wouldn't be fun or agreeable,” Alex admits. “I want it clear that you shouldn't do anything you're not comfortable with. But if you did it...could you protect yourself in there?” He gestures to his head. “Or would you live the memories the way I did?”

“No,” Isobel shakes her head. “It doesn't work like that. I wouldn't really live the memories because I'd experience them the way you do now, not then, and even then once-removed. So it's more like...watching TV, maybe. But with added 3D and smells.”

“That's what I was hoping for,” Alex murmurs.

“But what about you?” Isobel asks. “I'm not a trained therapist. I might not know when to pull out or...what if I hurt you?”

Alex shrugs. “There isn't a lot of damage you can do to me that I haven't already done myself.”

Isobel almost wants to scream at him. To do something, she doesn't know what, shake him, pull him out of this apathy that has swallowed him whole. The way he says that, like it's a simple fact and not the saddest thing in the world, shatters her resolution to be gentle and matter-of-fact. She reigns herself in, though. “Alex...”

“Sorry. I know how this sounds, I didn't mean it like that. I just meant that you're more likely to do good than harm.” He says all that with his face devoid of emotions, like he's already spent them all. There's no energy left in him. That's what Isobel has been trying to put her finger on. He's not hopeless, not exactly. He's just too tired for any kind of hope or joy or even sadness to come through.

Isobel takes a shaky breath. “I'll do it,” she says.

“I don't want you to make this decision lightly,” Alex whispers. “I'm afraid of what it could to you, even if it's just like...TV or whatever. I know that using your powers sometimes makes you physically sick, too.” He shifts painfully. “I wouldn't ask you if I saw any other option short of−” He gestures vaguely, then his hand falls back on his lap, spent.

“You did it for me.” Isobel wants to take his hand, but it's not time yet. She doesn't think he's ready to let her touch him. “It's not about paying you back, but… I want to do it. I want to help.”

Alex sighs and leans back, closing his eyes. “Thank you,” he murmurs barely audibly.

*

Their first encounter is a total coincidence. It's almost  one a.m . on a weekday, and Isobel is begging the pharmacist to give her something,  _anything_ that will help her sleep. The man's face is stuck somewhere between pity and wanting to throw her out, and she's that close to just going into his head.

A m onth ago, she'd have been in his head long before this. Now she can barely stand the thought of violating the mind of anyone, let alone a non-consenting stranger.

“He won't give you anything better than melatonin without a prescription,” Alex says from behind her. Isobel startles badly. She hasn't even heard him walk in, despite the bell that should have rung. “Sorry, I didn't mean to scare you,” he adds. 

“It's fine,” Isobel does her best to shrug, but her voice is too small, too high.

“Your friend's right, I can't give you anything,” the pharmacist says, like he hasn't been repeating that for at least fifteen minutes to Isobel's near frantic demands. She feels a rush of anger, but, perhaps because Alex is at her shoulder, standing just far enough away that she doesn't feel unsafe, she doesn't act on it. “Fine,” she grumbles. “Give me the fucking melatonin.”

She swipes her card and takes the box, more brutally than she means to. The look of  _finally_ on the man's face almost sends her over the edge, but Alex is still there.

“Isobel,” he calls her before she can walk out. She doesn't think she's ever heard him say her name. Truly, she knows him more through Michael, through being in Michael's head, than from the few interactions they had in high school. Yet his presence is weirdly calming. “The melatonin won't actually help if your sleep issues are what I think they are. Give me a minute to fill my prescription.”

“Why?” Isobel frowns.

Alex just waves at her to wait  as  he gives the pharmacist his  i nfo and gets half a dozen pill bottles in return.  Isobel listens distantly, but she only recognizes one of the names,  painkillers, she thinks .  Alex slips the bottle s into his coat pocket  with one hand, and she only sees now that he's leaning on his crutch. 

“Come on,” he beckons her as he walks out. Isobel follows, lost. The cold air outside hits her hard, and she shivers. “Your house isn't far from here, right?” Alex asks.

“It's just two blocks away,” Isobel answers. “I walked here.” She did it in a state, barely dressed properly, no make-up on, desperate to get some sleep. She suddenly feels self-conscious. “Why are _you_ here?” she frowns.

“This place is on my way to the base,” Alex explains.

“You're not coming from the base,” Isobel looks him over, noticing his civilian clothes.

“Not today. But it's easier to just keep coming to the same pharmacy.”

“At this hour?”

“I was working on something,” Alex shrugs. “Didn't see time pass.”

“I should let you head home, then,” Isobel says.

“Wait,” Alex stops her from turning on her heels. “How long have you been having sleep issues?”

“I fail to see how that's any of your business.”

“It's not. But you just watched me get my monthly meds. Maybe you didn't recognize the sleeping pills among them?”

“So what? Are you offering them to me?” Isobel sneers. She's not in any mood to be considerate, not when she's just thoroughly humiliated herself with the pharmacist and Alex both.

“I can't do that and you know it,” Alex says patiently. “But I know something about insomnia, and even ways to defeat it. You're aware that I know about your...circumstances, right?”

Isobel glares. “Yes. Michael told me.”

“Well, my car's right here. I'll drop you home. And, if you want, we can talk about how to avoid nightmares and intrusive thoughts.”

“Why would you do that?” Isobel asks suspiciously, but she still follows him to his car. She's cold. She's tired. She doesn't want to walk.

S he doesn't want to go back to an empty house.

“Because you shouldn't be alone,” Alex answers. “And I doubt Michael is helping you much right now.”

“So this is about Michael?”

Alex shrugs. “Does it make a difference if it is?”

“Maybe,” Isobel says. She won't be some kind of tool Alex can use to get back at Michael for looking somewhere else.

“Then no, it's not about him. It's about you. I just happen to know he's at the Pony getting wasted, so he probably wouldn't answer if you called him. You have no reason to trust me, Isobel, but you came to this pharmacy looking for help. I'm all the help you'll get tonight. You don't have to take it.”

Isobel is almost−almost−too proud to accept. She almost refutes it all, lies through her teeth, even though she knows he's right.

But she's really,  really  fucking tired.

“I haven't slept more than three hours a night in two weeks,” she mutters.

“Get in,” Alex gestures to the car.

He doesn't talk in the drive to her house−her and Noah's−well, hers, now−fuck. She tells him where to stop and chokes on her breath in silence.

“Isobel,” he says as he pulls over. “Look at me.”

Isobel lets out a small noise. The air feels thick, like syrup.  Noah's car isn't in the driveway. It's not supposed to be. Is it? Where is it?

“I need you to count, okay? Backwards. From fifty. Can you do that?”

What?

“Come on, with me. Fifty. Forty-nine. Forty eight.”

Isobel tries to draw a breath, but she chokes.

“Forty-seven. Isobel! You can do this. Breathe. Forty-six.”

Forty-five.

Forty-four.

Air. Finally. Her breaths are too shallow, but she's not gasping  anymore .

“Forty-three.”

Forty-two.

Isobel keeps counting, even as Alex stops. Deeper breaths make her head stop spinning, slowly.

Thirty-one.

Thirty.

“There you go,” Alex says.

“How−how did you do that?”

She's has panic moments like that before. She's had them for a long time, actually. Sometimes they end with her waking up somewhere she didn't fall asleep in. Sometimes she curls into a ball and waits for it to pass, wondering if she'll still be alive  by then.

“Panic attacks,” Alex answers. “You want to trick your brain out of the spiraling thoughts. Counting works, but it's better if you count in a way your brain can't compute automatically, like backwards, or three by three. Listing the things you see and hear can work too, but it's more useful if you're outside.”

Isobel swallows, her mouth dry.  “You know a lot about this.”

“I told you, I can help.”

“You a shrink or something? I thought you were an Airman,” Isobel says without thinking.

“I'm a disabled war veteran,” Alex shrugs. “And an abuse survivor. I know about panic attacks because I've been having them since I was six.”

I sobel takes a breath. “Okay,” she says. “Come on in.”

*

Isobel gains a one a.m. friend. They rarely talk to each other at any other time than the middle of the night. It's usually by text, sometimes a phone call if Isobel is having a hard time. Alex comes by sometimes around midnight and stays the night, and he says it's because he's too tired to head home after his work at the Project Shepard bunker, but he always has crutches and sweatpants and a toothbrush in his car.

S he texts him at two a.m. when she's had a nightmare, and he always answers within a few minutes. He's good at talking her down, almost enough to make her fall asleep.

She calls his at one a.m. because she just lost three hours and she's terrified of what she may have done, and he's gentle on the phone. He doesn't give her reassurances, he gives her solutions. He helps her figure out that she just lay in bed, too dissociated to feel her body. He helps her find what triggered it, and get rid of the lamp Noah bought her as a gift, the one that puts little stars on the ceiling.

She goes to his cabin, three times, when he finds her so distressed at her house that he drags her into his car and drives them all the way there. He lets her sleep beside him and he holds her.

D uring the day, she sees Michael, and sometimes Liz. She watches them both spiral into their own grief, and she feels like she's hanging on to a raft in the middle of a storm.

Alex is a bubble of quiet, and stability. It bursts the moment he's gone, but it give Isobel the chance to breathe. She cries, with him. She rages and she weeps and she mourns, and she knows that she can do it safely.

Because it seems like no one else will understand. Her parents watch her mourn Noah and they don't know who−what he was. Michael doesn't get why she needs to mourn him, because why mourn a serial killer?

“You're not mourning a serial killer,” Alex tells her once. “You're mourning the man you loved.”

Liz told her something like that too, but Alex understands it on a different level than Liz does. “You can mourn an idea. The life you thought you had, the life you wanted.  The version of yourself that he took from you. You can mourn t he man you thought he was. That's okay. It took me years to understand that I was grieving the family I'll never have.”

“But I can't separate it from who he really was,” Isobel points out.

“No, and that's what makes it so complicated. It's layered, and the anger and the pain and the sadness are all tangled. They're all okay to feel. They're okay to feel together, even if it seems like they're contradictory. Your feelings don't have to make sense to be valid, Isobel.”

“I don't know,” Isobel sobs. “I can't even trust that they're real, can I? He was in my mind the whole time. Did he make me love him?”

“He's gone now,” Alex murmurs. “He's not in your head anymore. He's dead. Your feelings are all your own, however complicated.”

H e lies beside her in silence on her bed as she cries herself to sleep.

In the morning, he's always gone.

*

“Why did you stop coming over?” Isobel asks when she slips back into Alex's mind. She doesn't bother trying to talk to him in the physical world. It's taking too much out of him just to stay awake and aware. Here, they're free.

Nearly free.

“You didn't need me anymore.”

Alex is curled up on the floor of the desert, a mirror of his physical position. Here, he looks like he did months ago, though, before he lost weight. Isobel has seen his leg disappear and come back, his perception change, but that seems to remain the same.

It happened so fast that his brain hasn't remapped itself to his current body, she understands. The last time she saw him was less than six weeks ago, and she didn't notice anything.

Maybe she didn't look hard enough.

“That's not true,” she says. 

Alex doesn't answer.

Isobel sits down next to him.  “You helped me so much, and I didn't even see you weren't doing well.”

“I didn't show you,” Alex mutters. “I didn't want you to know. I wanted to help.”

Isobel hugs her knees, rocking slightly.  “ At what price?”

“It felt good. To know that I could be useful for someone. For you, especially. That I could be something else than what my family made me.”

“So you thought it would be, what? redemption?”

Alex sits up slowly. “No. There is no redemption. I'm still a Manes, and there's no possible reparation for what my family did. For what I did.”

“What?” Isobel frowns. “What your family did is not your responsibility, Alex. And _you_ didn't do anything.”

Alex lips turn up in a mockery of a smile. “There isn't a soldier with my rank whose hands are clean, Isobel. Mine less than most. A nd...I had a chance to make a little bit of it right, but I failed, at Caulfield. I brought Michael, I went in too fast, with too little intel, and I made it all blow up. It's my fault.”

“That's not what Michael told me.”

“I've done nothing but bring him pain,” Alex says, like he didn't even hear her. There's a glimpse of something, a memory, but Alex clamps down on it with a shudder. “But with you, I could help. I could do _something_.”

“You did. You did help.”

“Yeah,” Alex nods. 

Isobel doesn't know what else to do, so she extends her arm and hugs him. Alex briefly stiffens, then he leans into it  just a little.

“Thank you,” she murmurs.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would say this is a heavy one, but they all are.
> 
> Specific warnings for this chapter: suicide ideation, self-harm, self-neglect, severe dissociation, mentions of (non-sexual) assault, alcohol, implied eating disorder, death and mourning, mentions of war

“Let's start again,” Alex gently pushes Isobel away, standing up. He's nimble and smooth here in the mindspace, but Isobel can feel the tremendous effort it's taking him.

She's briefly overwhelmed by how strong he really is.

“If I was strong, we wouldn't be here,” Alex frowns.

Isobel curses her porous shield again, that can't contain the strongest of her emotions. “ You are strong,” she says. “I know you can't see it, but you are. Remember what you told me? 'The shitty hand you've been dealt doesn't reflect on who you are as a person.'”

“So you're going to repeat my own words back at me?”

“If the shoe fits,” Isobel shrugs.

“I let things get out of control,” Alex says. “I could see them slipping away from me and I didn't do anything. How is that strong?”

“There wasn't anything that you could do, Alex. Not by yourself, anyway. Your only mistake was not believing we would have helped you.”

Alex doesn't voice his opinion of that, but he doesn't need to.  It comes through the mindspace anyway.  _I believe you would have helped. I didn't think I deserved it._

Isobel  feels tears threaten to fall−her own, not Alex. Alex's eyes haven't even moistened once in the time they've been here.

“I'm here to help now,” she says, because she doesn't know how to convince him that he deserves it. 

Alex avoids her eyes. “Let's do this,” he waves his hand.

*

Mimi looks wild and beautiful the way she always has, and completely out of place in the sterile room. Alex wants to throw up. He wants to carry her out of there and run far away with her.

"Alex baby what's wrong? You're all sad and hurt."

Alex tries to say that he's fine, but the words catch in his throat. He lets out something that sounds too much like a sob instead.

Mimi's eyes widen, clearer for a moment than he's seen them in months. "Maria did this? My baby did this to you? Oh Alex I'm so sorry." Mimi sounds terribly sincere and for a moment, just a little, the knot in Alex's stomach lets up. She opens her arms and engulfs him in a bear hug, and even though she smaller and frailer than him now, it still feels like the hug of a mother. It's the first time someone has touched Alex like this since he's an adult−in fact, Mimi is the closest thing he's had to a mother since his own left.

He opens his mouth to tell her that Maria did nothing wrong, because he can't stand the thought of creating a rift between the two of them, not because of him. But he doesn't have time to speak.

He can almost sense the shift. Mimi lets him go and the clarity is gone from her gaze when she looks up at him. "Alex? Oh baby who hurt you? You're so sad. Is it that father if yours again? I tried to tell someone, to warn them that Jesse is up to no good."

Alex swallows, realizing that she thinks he's a teenager again. He pats her arm and closes his eyes. "I'm alright, Mimi," he murmurs. "He can't hurt me anymore."

As much as it felt good to be supported without question, he's half-relieved. Mimi doesn't deserve that weight on her shoulders. She leans her head on his shoulder, and he holds her for a while more, his throat all knotted up again.

"Thank you Mimi," he murmurs before he leaves, a few minutes later. "You've been so good to me, and you're a great mother to Maria. She still needs you. I'll be back next week, alright?"

He tries not let it feel like a last goodbye. It's not. He will be back.

But nobody deserves the weight of his problems on top of theirs, least of all Mimi.

*

Alex fails to meet Maria's eyes, so he settles for somewhere over her shoulder. “You deserve anyone you set your sight onto, Maria. You deserve _him_. I never did.”

Maria works her jaw, hesitating. “You love him, though,” she says.

“Yeah, but that doesn't matter. Not if he doesn't love me back. Just...please take care of him?”

“Oh, Alex,” Maria says with tears in her eyes.

Alex stays still and stoical as she hugs him, even putting his arms around her and faking it perfectly. Isobel can feel it, the pain inside him that Maria can't begin to comprehend. The pain that can't, can never, be eased by the hug of the friend who just betrayed him.

But he fakes it, easily. It's always been easy, to hide the pain.

“I'm sorry,” Maria murmurs in his shoulder.

Alex pushes her away to look at her.  “ You didn't do anything wrong.”

“I broke my promise to you.”

“Yeah,” Alex says, sounding distant even to his own ears. “You did. But it was just...words, you know. It's not important.”

He thinks, later, that the only reason Maria didn't question that was that she yearned to be forgiven too much to pry. She's usually an astute person. Any other day, any other subject matter, she'd have pushed. But she didn't.

*

“Just words?” Isobel questions. “What does that mean?”

Alex shrugs. “Words don't matter. People say things, promise things, and then they take it all away. Actions...they're something you can't go back on.”

*

_It won't happen again._

_I don't look away, Alex, not really._

_We'll be best friends forever, okay?_

_Mama will be back for you, Alex, I promise._

The words are a swirl, faces engulfing them both until everything is just a mess of colors and sounds, indistinguishable. Isobel pulls, trying to dissipate them, but it's vain. Alex is caught up, and it means she is, too.

“Alex!”

_Nothing will ever come between us._

_We won't ever fight over a boy!_

_I'll be there to protect you from the world._

_I won't die if you don't._

Giving up on stopping the storm, Isobel tries to distinguish the voices instead. Kyle, as a child. Maria. Rosa. She hiccups. An Airman, wearing fatigues. A woman, who has to be Alex's mother. Michael. She doesn't even know which is which, they just meld together in one into a tornado of lies and betrayal and loss.

“Who is he?” she asks.

Alex seems to understand instantly who she means. “Karl. He died in my arm, while I was pinned down and couldn't do a single thing about it.” He's detached again, but then he chokes, hard, lets out a moan.

Isobel catches on to something else. “You were together?”

Alex closes his eyes, but the swirls don't ease. “Not really. He was hung up on a girl back home, and I couldn't let go of Michael entirely. We just...forgot together.”

*

_Hang on, M_ _anes_ _._ _I won't die if you don't._ He's beautiful, dark skin stained with white debris powder, and he's bleeding out. Alex hides his face in his shoulder, because he can't stand to see the light go out in his eyes.

He dies with his hand in Alex's, and a part of Alex dies with him. All of him, maybe. It's hard to feel alive, these days.

*

_I'll be there to protect you from the world,_ Rosa says once, when Alex expresses his fear of the future. He has plans, to get away from Roswell as soon as he turns eighteen. He and Rosa are going to leave together. They're going to be there for each other and make it into the world, two lost queer souls against the world.

Alex knows it's just a dream, but he holds onto it, every time his father gets angry. He meets Michael, and he starts dreaming about adding one more person to their little team. Two, maybe, if the stars in Rosa's eyes when she talks about Isobel Evans are anything to go by.

“Fuck,” Isobel murmurs.

It's the last time Alex sees Rosa for ten and a half years.

*

_ We won't ever fight over a boy! _ Maria is so passionate as she says that, and Alex has tears in his eyes. 

Coming out to anyone, even his two best friends, is terrifying. It's taken him almost eight months just to get the words out of his mouth.

“Never,” Liz adds. “But we can talk about them!”

Alex hugs them both.

They never  truly  fight over a boy.  Alex doesn't let them  fight over Michael, because Michael is the one who makes his choice . But years later, he remembers this moment with bitterness.

*

_ Nothing will ever come between us, _ Kyle says as he sits down on the floor of the tree house they've just finished. They're too old to make 'blood pacts' the way little kids do, but they're going to be best friends forever. They don't need anyone else.

Alex ignores the part of himself that is starting to want something different, and he roughly hugs his best friend before tickling him mercilessly.

Their friendship lasts another three months.

*

_ Mama will be back for you, Alex, I promise. _ Alex is six, and he's too young to understand what his brothers already know.

Iris Manes ran for her life. As an adult, Alex knows that. He knows that she had to leave them behind.

She never comes back.

*

_I don't look away, Alex, not really._

Michael is a sight of beauty, leaning on his truck in the desert, his face so earnest and open. Alex has never loved him more−and yet he doesn't know what to do with the words. The kiss was easy to respond to, but the words never are.

So he makes it into a kiss again.

*

The storm centers over the intensity of the kiss, of Alex's focused love, and finally dies down.

“Alex?” Isobel asks cautiously.

Alex is sitting on the floor, rocking slightly. He doesn't respond. She tries to touch him, but he flinches away violently.

“Alex!”

*

Michael is leaning against his truck again, when Alex makes it's to Max's. Alex feels his eyes bore a hole into him as he maneuvers to get out of his car with his crutches.

He doesn't say anything, though. They've barely said anything to each other in months, since that night in the Airstream. Alex has picked him up drunk from the Pony countless times, but they don't _talk_.

Michael makes a move to catch him when Alex staggers, and he can feel an invisible force stabilizing him. He glares. He doesn't need help, thank you very much.

Michael stares back softly.

“Hey,” Kyle call from behind them. Alex turns to him. “Hi.”

“We were waiting for you. You alright? What's with the leg?”

“Nothing,” Alex shrugs. His prosthesis won't fit anymore. He's dealt with the discomfort and pain with extra lining and pure stubbornness for weeks, but he's uncontrollably losing weight, and that's unforgiving.

“Did you hurt yourself?” Kyle frowns. “You weren't wearing the prosthesis the other day either.”

“It's nothing, I just overdid it. And I'm probably overdue for another fitting.”

“You're not taking care of yourself properly,” Kyle sighs. “You could end up with an infection.”

“Kyle, I'm fine,” Alex snaps. Michael's presence makes him for irritable than he usually is with his friend. “I have an appointment this week,” he tries to mitigate it. His prosthesist is probably just going to tell him that he needs to get his weight under control, but he keeps that to himself.

Kyle back off, raising his hands. “Okay, sorry. Everyone's waiting for you inside.”

“Can you take this for me?” Alex asks, grabbing the folder from his car.

“Sure.”

Michael lingers. “You sure you're okay?” he asks when Kyle has disappeared back inside.

Alex's mind goes to the contents of the folder. Proof, of everything that his family did to exterminate Michael's species. Alex wants nothing more than to run away right now, be far far away when the three aliens read it.

Not because he's afraid of their anger. He deserves it.

He can't stand the thought of their pain.

And here Michael is, worried about  _him._

He closes his eyes, briefly, and hears Maria's laugh come from inside the house, through the still opened door.

Right,  Michael only worries  about him because of lingering guilt, because of feelings he wants to get rid of. 

“I'm fine,” Alex brushes him off.

*

“Dammit, Alex!” Isobel shouts.

Alex opens his eyes, and finally focuses on her. He swallows hard, still rocking. Isobel has to raise her shield tighter to avoid getting blown away by his pain.

“I'm fine,” he murmurs.

Isobel wants to shake him.

*

“You know what I realized?” Maria half-slams her shot glass on the coffee table. It's her one day off, the bar handled by her employees, and she's dragged him up to her apartment.

S he's drunk. Too drunk. More than Alex can handle right now, but he'll do this for her, because she'd do it for him.

She would have, anyway, Alex corrects himself. If she hadn't fallen for the man h e loves.

No, he can do this for Maria. He can comfort her after she broke up with Michael, and pretend for her for one evening that this doesn't stand between them. That they can just be friends with boy problems, like they used to be. He's used to pretending.

“The hope I saw in you, about Museum Guy? I saw it in him too. I didn't even know.”

Maria won't let him pretend tonight, though.

“Maria−” Alex starts, because no, actually, he can't listen to this.

“He changed, after you started seeing each other again. Or, I assume that was when? He didn't drink as much. He didn't come to get shitfaced and provoke a fight anymore.”

Alex closes his eyes and sighs. Maria is too drunk to listen to anything he says. She'll follow her own train of thought.

He wants to run, or sing loudly or something. He wants to distract her somehow, but he doesn't even have the energy for that.

“That's when I fell for him,” Maria sobs.

Alex's nails break the skin of his palm. He leans into the sting, wanting to hit his head against the wall.

“I didn't even look at him, before. He was just the town drunk, you know? A thorn in my foot.” Maria pauses. “I screwed you over real bad, didn't I?” she drawls.

Alex doesn't know what to answer to that. He wants the broken skin of his hand to bleed, bleed until he bleeds out and doesn't have to deal with this anymore. Can he dig his nails deep enough into his wrist for that?

“Yeah, you did,” he settles on, because guilt is swallowing him whole and he wants to share it a little.

Maria breaks down in tears. “I'm sorry, Alex. I'm so sorry.”

“I know you are,” Alex sighs.

“I've been such an awful friend. Can you ever forgive me?”

Alex closes his eyes. There. The burden is placed on him again, to stay, to forgive, to pretend, to help. To pay for all his mistakes, real or imagined, and the ones of generations of his family before him.

Okay, he's being a little overdramatic. That's not what Maria is asking for. Maria's just asking for his forgiveness. And that should be simple enough to give, shouldn't it? In fact, he's already given it to her, multiple times. She keeps asking.

He doesn't say the words. He makes Maria drink a glass of water, and coaxes her up to her apartment, not leaving her until she's fast asleep on her bed. He goes through the motions, getting himself back down−the narrow stairs are almost his demise, his crutches trying to slip on the ancient wood−and out to his car.

He's overtaken by a stomach cramp before he can get in to drive. He hasn't drank a drop tonight, but he also couldn't bring himself to eat any of the peanuts or green olives Maria leaves on the counter. The pain is nearly unbearable for a minute, and he doesn't hear the four men approach until it's too late.

He falls at the first blow.

*

Alex isn't rocking anymore, just staring into space as the memories play out around them. Isobel carefully lays a hand on his arm.

“You with me?”

*

Buffy stopped trying to get him to come out two days ago. Alex just lies on his bed, trying to breaths through the impossible pain of his body wasting away. His ribs make it hard to breathe and his stump is infected. He's too weak, now, to even stand with his crutches. 

H e debates with himself for a long time. Buffy can run on her own around the cabin, Alex trusts her to find her way back and she never goes very far on her own anyway. But she needs to be fed, and he can't just give her the whole bag of dog food to eat from until he's well enough to get to the kitchen−that would require getting it from the kitchen now, for one, and it's clearly not going to happen. And if he just opens the bag for her, she won't know when to stop eating.

He sighs. Buffy has been a tiny light in a world of darkness, when she lies beside him and snuggles her nose into his neck, but she's affected by his moods, too. Her hair is starting to look dull, and she moves less and less.

Maybe it's time he lets her go.

He grabs his phone.

_Alex: Hey, could you do me a favor? I have to leave for a bit, do you think you could take Buffy?_

He grimaces at the lies. He's tried to avoid outright lying until now, but it's better this way. He can't risk Buffy's life, but he also can't make Kyle deal with the mess he's become. Kyle doesn't deserve that.

His phone buzzes after a few minutes, making him jump. Alex has to blink several times before the screen is clear enough to read.

_Kyle: I get off at 6, I can swing by and pick her up. Where are you going?_

_Alex: Something came up, I just need a few days. Sorry to bother you._

He thinks for a moment. Kyle can't see him when he comes by.

_Alex: Use your key, I'll be gone by 6. Thank you._

The tiny bedroom, with the grab bar he installed on the wall by his bed early on, is practical in that he can reach the door in just one step. He waits until just before six, setting an alarm on his phone so he won't sleep through it, and gives Buffy one last hug and belly rub.

It feels like goodbye.

“I love you, girl,” he murmurs.

Alex has a knot growing hard in his throat when he gets Buffy out of the bedroom, using the last of his strength to close the door behind him. He barely makes it back to the bed and under the covers, shivering. He can only hope that Kyle won't bother to look through the cabin, and just grab Buffy's things from the living room and the kitchen.

Things don't go according to plan. Alex is dissociating so deeply by the time Kyle pulls up to the cabin that he doesn't hear him until he's already in the living room. Buffy is still desperately scratching at the door to his bedroom, and that's what tips Kyle off.

“Alex?” Kyle calls from behind the closed door.

Alex stops breathing, hoping that Kyle will just write it off as a fluke and leave.

Or does he?

The realization is sudden and staggering. If Alex doesn't make a noise right now, if Kyle doesn't open the door and find him, he's going to die. He doesn't have long left, with no food or drink within reach.

Alex has fantasized about dying since the day his father first laid a hand on him. He's come close, withing inches of it, three times−not counting the dozens of near misses that come with any combat situation, and only serve to give him a peak of adrenaline. He's known for weeks that he's running toward a fourth time, but he didn't _know._

If he lets Kyle go, he'll walk to his death with his eyes wide open. Is that what he wants?

Kyle doesn't give him the chance to decide. He opens the door wide, and his eyes widen in shock. “Alex?”

*

In the dark bedroom, Isobel weeps.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huge thanks to InsidiousIntent for helping me out with the sex scene!
> 
> I've updated the total number of chapters to 9, as this got longer than I thought. That means I won't finish posting before the beginning of season 2, but I hope you'll keep reading even with the excitement over new content!
> 
> Specific warnings for this chapter (they're a little spoilery, but warnings are more important): this is highly unusual for me, but the last scene of this chapter is a non-explicit sex scene. It presents consent issues because it's implied that Alex has sex while dissociating, and he's not okay with it afterwards. In the same scene, non-sexual consent issues (related to disability) are also raised. There is also a semi-graphic description of the shed scene, with all the warnings that implies. Other warnings: vomiting, implied eating disorder, discussion of abuse, explosions.

Isobel is starting to feel the strain of the mindspace. She doesn't know if it's because she's never used her powers for so long before−it's been almost five hours, according to her watch−or the emotional rollercoaster. She's supposed to be detached. She can protect herself from Alex's pain and anguish, but it doesn't prevent her own emotions.

She's never suffered so hard for someone else before. Empathy, toward humans especially, is not her strongest quality. She's kept her distances her whole life, because she couldn't afford to feel other people's pain, not with her mind and her power fragile and vulnerable.

In the last few months, as she rebuilt herself from the ground up, she learned to be strong. Maybe strong enough to go on this journey with Alex and come out unscathed. But, she's starting to realize, unscathed will not mean unchanged.

In the locked bathroom, she weeps for Alex as he doesn't weep for himself.

It takes her a few minutes to pull herself back together. She wipes off her ruined mascara, and doesn't bother with more makeup. She tries to rinse the taste of vomit and acetone from her mouth and wishes she'd brought a toothbrush.

“Is it going alright?” Kyle asks her when she steps into the living room.

“We're taking a break,” Isobel says. “I need to move, I'll go walk Buffy.”

“Okay,” Kyle nods, still looking worried.

It's on both their faces, Isobel knows.

“How long can he stay like this?” she asks.

Kyle sighs. “I have him on IV nutrition and saline, so he can last a few days. But it's not a long term solution. At all. If he can't feed himself, he'll need a feeding tube.”

Isobel winces, nauseous at the very thought of forcing that on Alex. “I'm not sure that we're making progress,” she says. “It's hard going.”

“It was always going to be.”

“I know. But I don't know if my power is strong enough to do what he needs, if his idea even works. Or if I'm strong enough,” Isobel quietly admits.

Kyle takes a hard look at her, and comes over to hug her. Isobel leans into his arms, forbidding herself from crying again.

“You are,” Kyle says. “But you need to protect yourself, too.”

Isobel swallows. “Alex keeps telling me that, but it's hard. He's so...”

Kyle squeezes her tighter in answer.

*

“Michael,” Isobel says when she slips back into Alex's mind. “He keeps coming up.”

“You know about us, right?” Alex asks, not making a move to stand up from the desert floor.

“Only what he told me, and the little you've shown me. You had a thing in high school, he's never stopped loving you. You came back, but he hooked up with Maria DeLuca at some point.”

“That's one way to tell the story,” Alex almost laughs. “Only, it's missing one key element.”

“What?”

“Not what, who. My dad.”

*

“Maybe you ought to call it a night, uh? Use the evening to educate yourself on how to properly represent your country?”

Isobel shivers at the threat buried under the perfectly mundane tone. This is her specialty, the one she learned at her mother's knee, how to make your intentions perfectly clear through allusions and minute eyebrow raises. Jesse Manes is good at it, but more than that−he's good at this specific kind of threats.

“Do I embarrass you, _Dad_?” Alex taunts him.

His tone is perfectly modulated, low pitched enough not to sound like a rebellious teenager, just what is needed to make it look like Jesse Manes is the one being unreasonable. Isobel could almost believe it, if she didn't feel Alex's sheer terror coming in spades.

And the terror is not for himself, she understands as she watches Jesse Manes look over Alex's shoulder at Michael.

“You are a decorated, Purple Heart Airman with three deployments under his belt. Guerin is arrested once a week for gambling and bar fighting. Seems to me the only one you're embarrassing is yourself, son.”

Alex's skin crawls at the last word. “He knew exactly what to say to get me,” present-Alex explains−and his skin is crawling too. Just the memory, an almost out-of-body experience, is enough to revive the feeling. “Implying that just being seen with Michael could get me dishonorably discharged. I checked Michael's arrest record later, and he doesn't have a conviction, but I didn't know that for sure then.”

“I remember that night,” Isobel says. “I tried to convince Liz to leave town again. Michael and I thought she was going to flip on us. She'd started to experiment with Max's blood, and his power, we were terrified.”

“I didn't know about that,” Alex responds. “That morning, you almost walked in on Michael and me in the Airstream.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. Michael would have been fine with it, but I got scared. I just… I've been hiding for so long, and this wasn't some random hookup, this was _Michael_ , in fucking Roswell of all places, I flipped out. He thought I was ashamed of him.”

“Were you?”

“No. Never. But I barely knew you, I didn't even know you were his sister, not really, and it's ingrained in me so deep that me being with him is putting him in danger that I couldn't help it. But he didn't let me explain. I'm not sure I could have, anyway. We've never been good at explaining things.”

“But you were with him, that night, weren't you? Actually together? I remember seeing you.”

“I thought...I thought if I showed him that I wasn't ashamed, he'd forgive me. I'm not sure what I was thinking, to be honest. I remember...”

The memory switches to Jesse Manes in uniform, addressing the public. Alex shudders. “I remember you standing beside my father while he talked about injured veterans, he was looking straight at me the whole time, and I _knew_ what he was thinking.”

It's a warm summer night, but Alex feels cold to his bones in the memory. He can't escape his father's gaze, so he presses his bad leg into the ground instead, trying to anchor himself to the pain. Michael's presence at his side burns him, the gripping fear hitting his heart like a hammer, like−

Like a hammer on Michael's hand, hitting, hitting, hitting−

Like hands around his throat, he can almost feel them from here−

“Stop,” Isobel commands. Alex is almost too far gone, but the memory freezes and dissipates at her order−she's in charge in the mindspace. “That hammer, that scene, the last one...”

Alex's pounding heart and the sickening crack of bones, blood, so much blood−

“Alex!”

“Sorry,” Alex breathes automatically, an ingrained response. He's not even there anymore.

“Fuck, Alex!” Isobel shouts, shaking him.

Alex raises his hand as if to push her away, but she _pulls_ at his mind. She's in charge, she reminds herself. She can't get caught up in his flashback. “Alex!”

Alex falls back on his ass on the floor−the desert floor, once more. He wheezes, and Isobel knows the panic attack is transcending through the mindspace, into his physical body. She needs to calm him down.

She kneels. “Alex, breathe with me, okay? In. Out.”

Alex looks up at her, then around him, frantically. “We're not there anymore,” Isobel says. “Come on, in. Out.”

Slowly, Alex's breathing synchronizes with hers. “Good. Good. Should we take a break?”

“No,” Alex murmurs. “I don't think I'll be able to start again if we do.”

“Okay. So you broke up with Michael because of your father?” Isobel asks.

She meant at the drive-in, but that's not the association Alex's mind makes. In a flash they're back in the chaos.

It's a toolshed, Isobel understands, looking around. The memory is unstable, shaking like Alex, rushing, time distorted. Feelings running wild between exhilaration−Alex's first time, Isobel tries not to think about the fact that it was with her brother−and terror.

Terror wins.

There's a hand around his neck, and Alex chokes, and chokes, and his father's voice, “No son of mine,” and a hammer and−

“Michael!” Isobel can't help yelling. The Michael in the memory can't hear her, and Jesse Manes catches hold of him.

The cracks are sickening, and Isobel throws up at the same time as Alex−in the memory, because in the middle of this tornado, present-Alex is nearly calm. He's not, not really, but he's watching it all dispassionately.

Memory-Alex screams.

Jesse Manes finally−finally−lets go of Michael, who slumps onto the floor, and turns back to his son.

Isobel staggers are the cold hatred in his gaze. It's not emotional hate, the one that's just one step removed from love, that triggers anger and rage and anguish. It's pure, cold hatred.

Jesse Manes is looking at his own son like he isn't even human.

And Isobel watches. Her worst fear used to be seeing this look directed at her, by a man in a doctor coat and restraints in his hands, until it became seeing it in her own gaze in the mirror.

Alex is the one who pulls them out this time.

*

“Your father is the one who hurt Michael's hand,” Isobel states.

She's sitting down on the floor, in shock. She's shaking, she notices distantly.

“Yes,” Alex confirms.

“I never asked him. It was the same night that−”

“That the three of you covered up Rosa's murder? I know.”

Isobel shivers. Alex is still lying down here, still distant, still dissociating. It's amazing and terrifying, that he can do that even inside his own mind.

“We could never have a normal relationship after that,” he says. “I enlisted soon after, and Michael was supposed to go to college. It just...stayed between us. I never even talked about it with anyone, before today.”

“You've been keeping that to yourself all along?”

Alex shrugs. “Never had anyone to tell. My father is a respected Airman. Now that I outrank him, maybe someone would believe me, but I was a gay man in the Air Force during DADT. I tried not to out myself or Michael.”

“You repressed this part of yourself for so long,” Isobel sighs.

“Sometimes it feels like...I only ever defined myself by what my father wanted me to be. I tried to conform, then I tried to escape it, and he caught me. I let it go after that. What good does it bring to be yourself if it brings you so much pain?”

Isobel lets his words sink in. “Freedom?” she offers.

Alex huffs. “Do you really believe that we can be free?”

“I hid everything I am for years too,” Isobel says. “I thought it kept me safe, and it did the opposite. It allowed Noah to deceive me and take over my life and my mind. I want to be free of him. I want to be free of everyone like him.”

“At what price?” Alex asks. “My father mangled Michael's hand because he slept with me once. What do you think he'd have done because Michael's an alien?”

“Get down!” the cry comes from nowhere, and Isobel raises her head in panic. Alex doesn't even move.

The explosion would have blown her eardrums, if her body was real. Flames go up everywhere−no, over the building, exploding out, the blast going over them without affecting them. It's a memory, Isobel reminds herself.

She finds them, then. Kyle, Alex and Michael, crouching behind a Jeep. “He killed Michael's family,” present-Alex says. “He killed Michael's mother, and I watched him do it.”

“He can't hurt you or Michael anymore,” Isobel reminds him.

“It doesn't matter. It's too late for us now.”

Isobel scouts closer to him.

“Were you ever happy?” she asks.

Alex makes a strange face, like a smile is trying to creep up on him, but he doesn't want to let it. Or maybe that's just Isobel projecting the whirling mix of feelings she's getting from him into the mindspace.

“There were moments,” he says.

*

He's being kissed in a dark room, hands on his neck, lips hesitant and eager and sweet. Isobel makes a face when she realizes it's her brother. She doesn't want to know what it feels like to be kissed by her seventeen-year-old brother. But Present-Alex has a dreamy look on his face.

Is that really the best day of his life?

Isobel wants to scream.

*

“Was that the same day as−” she starts.

The room around them starts to change again, become the toolshed behind Alex's house, but Alex pulls them back. “Yes,” he says.

*

He's being kissed in a dark room again. The colors aren't the same, the lights are dancing and flickering and the music is loud in the background, but Alex doesn't hear it.

Isobel recognizes the high school reunion she organized. They're in the hallway, the one where she set up the projector. Michael looks flush and eager and unguarded, from the second his lips crash onto Alex's.

For one moment, Alex feels alive.

*

“This isn't happy,” she says, trying not to cry. It's relieved, maybe. A weight coming off his shoulders, that Michael is still here, still alive after all this time. It's nostalgia and pain and hurt and fear and bliss. It's a moment he's dreamed of a thousand times and never dared to hope for.

It's gone in an instant.

“Then what is?” Alex asks.

*

He wakes up to the sun on his face, through the windows of the Airstream. Isobel recoils from the memory when she feels her brother's naked, sleeping form. “Yuk!”

Alex is transfixed. The love pouring out of him is unbearable.

Isobel wants to throw up.

“What, you can't handle looking at your brother like this?” Alex asks.

She shakes her head. Michael doesn't matter. But she can't handle Alex's twisted pain any longer.

*

“It's love,” she says. “But it's not happy.”

“It was supposed to be,” Alex shrugs. “I wanted it to be.”

“Wanting isn't always enough.”

“I know.”

*

“Go! Go! I don't love you!” Michael screams. “I don't! We've been holding onto this thing, and what? It's gotten us nowhere. Just let go.”

Alex's tears have all the decade-old baggage of their failed relationship, because Michael is right, they've gotten nowhere. He takes the blow of his words in the face and doesn't tear his eyes away.

“You're a miserable liar,” he forces out.

Michael loves him and their love is pain. But in this moment, Alex's love has to be strong enough to save both their lives. Because Alex isn't getting out of this building without Michael.

His love isn't strong enough.

*

“He watched his mother blow up. Then Max dies. I can't blame him for pushing the pain away,” Alex says. He's rationalized it over and over in the months since then. “Him going to Maria wasn't about me.”

“You're allowed to be jealous, Alex,” Isobel says.

But he's not. He's never been. He doesn't feel entitled to Michael's love like that.

He almost let himself believe that if he worked hard, he could be good enough to deserve it, someday. But it was too late. Michael has moved on.

_*_

Michael shows up on a rainy night, three days after Alex is officially discharged from the Air Force. It's a coincidence that Alex is even at the cabin, since he's spending most of his time at the bunker. Michael has only never even been here before, so his truck pulling up beside Alex's SUV is a surprise.

Michael has tear tracks on his face, almost drowned out by the rain, when he knocks on the door. Alex is on one leg, half-high on painkillers and exhausted, but he's never been able to refuse Michael anything, and certainly not when Michael is in this state. He lets him in and lets him strip out of his wet coat without a word.

At least for once, Michael doesn't seem drunk.

Alex shifts his weight off his crutches and frees one of his hands to reach him.

“Michael, what's wrong?” Alex gently touches his chin to make him look up.

“It failed,” Michael murmurs. “Again. This was the closest we've come to a solution, and it failed at the last moment.”

“For Max?”

Michael nods in his hand. “It's like he's slipping away from us, with every test that goes wrong. Even Liz is close to giving up.”

“I'm sorry,” Alex sighs. He really is. He's seen first-hand what grief and losing hope is doing to Liz, to Michael, to Isobel.

“I want to think about something else,” Michael says. “Please.”

“Alright,” Alex nods.

Before he can say another word, maybe offer to watch a movie, Michael has his hands around his neck, and he's pulling their faces together. Their lips crash almost violently, like every time, like magnets made to attract each other. Michael slips his tongue into Alex's mouth right away and presses their body together, and Alex can't even help reciprocating. The relief, the ease, is staggering.

He doesn't manage a coherent thought until they're already on his bed, his crutches abandoned on the floor, his pants already going the same way.

“Michael, wait,” he murmurs.

Michael stops moving, leaning over him.

“What about Maria?” Alex asks.

Michael doesn't answer. He still refuses to meet Alex's eyes. Alex pushes him away. “So you're doing this for what? You don't want to be with me, but you still want to fuck? That's all this is?”

Michael grabs the collar of Alex's shirt and roughly pulls him back against him.

“No,” he rasps, his voice hoarse. But it's a lie. Or Michael is lying to himself. What's clear is that he has no intention of making any decision toward what this means for their relationship.

But he kisses Alex again, and Alex becomes boneless against him. He's exhausted, and Michael feels good. Too good. Michael's hands feel like sandpaper against his skin, nails leaving scratches down his back and shoulders. But Alex needs this, his body craving the heat and closeness of Michael, the way he always has.

Michael falls back against the bed, sated and sweaty.

“I love you,” he murmurs, a dreamy look on his face.

That's what wakes Alex up.

“No,” he says, his voice breaking. “No.” More forcefully. “Fuck, I can't do this.” He pushes Michael away more roughly than he'd usually dare, and searches around for his underwear. “I can't.”

“Alex−” Michael rolls onto his elbow.

“No! Fuck, Michael, you can't just say things like that!”

He wants to throw up. In fact, he's just seconds away from it. He gives up on underwear and grabs his crutches from the floor instead.

“Alex!” Michael calls.

Alex shakes his head and starts making his way to the bathroom. Only suddenly his crutches won't move. He jerks in surprise, almost overbalancing, and freezes.

Pure rage rises inside him.

“Let them go,” he demands coldly, without turning back.

He couldn't handle Michael's gaze on him, not right now.

“Alex−” Michael tries again.

“No. You _do not_ get to use my disability like this,” Alex lets his voice go dangerously low.

Michael takes a horrified breath and lets him go. Alex does overbalance this time as his crutches are suddenly released from the force keeping them in place. His long hours learning how to fall in PT are the only thing that keeps him from injuring himself.

He gathers himself back up without looking back at Michael, and only just makes it to the toilet before he's puking his guts out.

“Alex?” Michael calls, following him. “Are you sick?”

Alex closes his eyes and lowers himself to the bathroom floor. “Leave,” he demands. “Now.”

“But−”

“I'm fine,” Alex lies through his teeth. “But I need you to go.”

Michael looks a cross between worried and pissed−or is it ashamed? “What the fuck, Alex?”

Alex swallows more bile. “Please.” He sounds far more pleading than he meant to, but at least it works. Michael turns on his heels without another word, gathers his clothes, and in a minute, he's gone.

Alex leans his forehead against the toilet seat, tears running down his face.

He feels sore in places that Michael has only even caressed before. He feels bruised, not just his body but his mind, too, from the one, fleeting moment of hope and crashing back down.

He consented to this, he was fully aware of what he was doing, and yet he feels violated. Dirty, like a piece of trash thrown aside when he's not needed anymore.

That's all he is now, to Michael. He had something once, he had this beautiful thing with a man who actually loved _him_ , loved Alex, and he managed to fuck it up so much that it's become this.

Just like with everyone else.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Specific warnings: discussion of consent (mostly non-sexual), discussion of canonical abuse, Jesse Manes (is his own warning), mentions of abuse, mentions of homophobia, injuries from abuse.
> 
> Chapter 6 is all Malex again, and just as angsty...

“I can't fucking believe he did this,” Isobel rages. She wants to shake Alex until he's as angry as she is, but he isn't even looking at her. 

“He didn't mean any harm,” he says tonelessly.

“I don't care! That was completely insensitive! It was just crass!”

“It doesn't matter,” Alex sighs. “It was months ago, anyway.”

“But he−” Isobel interrupts herself. “Wait,” she tries to figure out what she missed. “You were more angry that he used his power than for the sex.”

Alex frowns, not understanding her confusion. “The sex was...insensitive, as you put it, but I participated willingly.”

“So it's about consent?” Isobel asks.

“When I don't have my leg, my crutches _are_ my legs,” Alex says, annoyed. “Would you let him bodily restrain you from walking away?”

Isobel opens her mouth to answer something asinine, but she just closes it again. She doesn't know why her mind didn't make that parallel before now, but he's right.  She would never accept that from her brothers, or anyone, in normal circumstances.

Alex throws up his hand, actually angry now.  “ Michael's power, all of your powers, they're not something you can just throw around like you please! I thought  _you_ at least would have learned that!”

T his is the most emotional response Isobel has seen from him since they started.  It gives her a tiny speck of hope, and for that she puts aside the biting comeback on her lips.

“What do you mean?” she asks.

“I know you three don't care much about playing by human rules, and that's understandable, but the things you've done? I was angry at Michael, but not surprised that it's the first thing he thought to do.”

Isobel stares at him, uncomprehending.

“Lying to protect yourself is one thing, but you basically framed Rosa for the death of Jasmine and Kate,” Alex says. He's actually looking her in the eye, for the first time. “And maybe you didn't mean to do that, but then you went and made Liz leave Roswell before her sister's funeral! Max healed Michael's hand without his consent, and I won't even go into him resurrecting Rosa.”

“I made Kyle inject me with the serum,” Isobel completes. “I went into random people's minds to train my power. And...” she hesitates. “And it's not that different from Noah using my body.”

She closes her eyes. Alex shyly extend a hand to squeeze her shoulder. “You had to adapt to having powers no one else had, and you had to hide who you were,” he says slowly. “It makes sense that you would develop this 'us against the world' mentality that you have going. But what you do affects other people, too.”

Isobel nods. She puts her hand over Alex's on her shoulder, to show that she's not angry, and shakes herself. She feels terrible, suddenly, but this isn't the right place to process this.

“I hear your point,” she says. “And you're right. We've been...all three of us tend to forget that.”

Alex just nods and removes his hand, the touch becoming too much.

“Michael blocking you like that was wrong,” Isobel continues. “It was wrong of him to come to your place to have sex after he rejected you.”

Alex swallows. “To be fair, I don't think it was his intention. I don't think he knew what he wanted. He just needed comfort, and I'd been the one hauling his drunken ass home for weeks, so he came to me.”

“I feel like that's somehow even worse,” Isobel says.

Alex shrugs.  “As I said, it was months ago,  and it was a one-time thing. I wouldn't have let it happen again. ”

“Did he come back?”

“No,” Alex shakes his head. “After that day, I realized that I'd been holding onto the stupid hope to keep having some kind of relationship with him, that we could become friends, maybe, even if we couldn't be together, but we can't. We'll just keep falling into bed and hurting each other. He and Liz got Max back just a few days later and I figured out that I had to let him go.”

“Let him go?” Isobel frowns.

Alex bites his lip. “You know what's in his bunker, right?”

“The ship console?” Isobel asks. She only found out about it recently, but she's not surprised that Alex knows. It would be on par with Michael's grand gestures of love, to have shown him first.

Alex nods. “Jim Valenti found a piece of it somewhere, and he left it here in the cabin. I...I made a mistake here. I was selfish. I found the piece even before Michael showed me the console−that's what clued me in on the alien thing, actually. But I didn't give it to him straight away, I held on to it.”

“Why?” Isobel asks. What could Alex want to do with a piece of the alien ship console?

Alex curls up on himself, averting his gaze.  “ When he showed it to me, he said that he wanted to rebuild the ship. To be able to leave.”

Isobel's mouth opens in surprise. “Leave the planet?”

“Yeah. Some part of me thought that...if I didn't give him the piece, then he couldn't leave, right? I know how ridiculous that sounds, but−”

“It makes a lot more sense than Michael thinking he can build a spaceship in his bunker,” Isobel deadpans.

Alex raises an eyebrow. “Fair,” he mutters. “ I went to the junkyard to give it to him, after Max was resurrected. He was really angry that I didn't talk about it sooner. We just argued back and forth, like we were talking past each other.” He grows quiet. “It was the furthest away from him that I've ever felt. Even when I was overseas. ”

*

A lex and Michael are facing each other in the Airstream, in the narrow space between the table and the bed. There's a guitar between them, sitting on the table, sticking out into the passageway and preventing Alex from coming further inside. He stands with his weight fully on his left leg, like his right is bothering him, the crutch present again at his side.  Michael has a large shard of the alien console in his hand, that glints in the sunlight from a crack in the window's paper covering every time he moves.

Isobel catches the tail end of the argument, right at that moment when the fight seems to go out of them and they just look tired. It doesn't look like either of them has gotten a good night's sleep in a while.

“You knew how important this is to me,” Michael is saying, bitterness coloring his voice. “I thought you understood.”

“I do understand,” Alex mutters. “I'm sorry, okay? I really am.”

Michael deflates, and they both look down, now uncomfortable with their proximity in the tiny space. Alex looks at the guitar, making a small, aborted movement toward it.

“It's Maria's,” Michael says quietly. “She loaned it to me. She said she doesn't play anyway.”

“She doesn't.” Alex sounds sad, more sad than the words should make him. “Did you even recognize it?”

Michael frowns, so Alex leans over to point to the row of tiny stickers on the side, without ever touching the guitar. A black skull. A treble clef. A tiny alien head and a UFO. “It's yours?”

Alex nods. “I gave it to Maria before I left.” His hand hovers close to the guitar for a while more, as Michael's face turns to guilt. Alex doesn't see it. He can't bring himself to look at him.

“I swore to myself that day that I'd never touch an instrument again,” present-Alex tells Isobel.

The memory morphs in front of their eyes, into an office. They're on a military base, Isobel sees, looking out of the window. There are enlistment posters on the walls, piles of files on the desk, a stern woman in an Air Force uniform behind it. She's staring down a much younger Alex, who squirms under her gaze. From the other seat, Jesse Manes glares at Alex, who sits up straighter, hiding a wince. He's wearing an oversize sweatshirt and, despite the summer heat, a scarf.

“It's laryngitis,” Jesse Manes is saying. “He keeps spending too much time inside with the air conditioning dialed up. I hope the Air Force can finally knock some sense into him.”

Alex nods meekly.

“Of course, Sergeant,” the woman answers. “You just have to sign here,” she shows Alex a slot on the papers in front of him. “You'll start basic training as soon as the doctor clears you.”

Alex is too careful leaning in to sign with his right hand, his left remaining stuck in his front pocket, but Isobel has to give it to him that he has a good poker face. The sheer pain, both physical and emotional, emanating from him makes her gasp, but he shows nothing.

“The day you enlisted?” she asks, forcing the pain away. She's lucky enough that she can do that. The adult Alex in front of her looks at his younger self with compassion, ignoring the pain completely, even though he has to be feeling it full force.

“Yes. Four days after the shed. My neck was so bruised that I could barely speak.”

“What's the connection?”

“What happened after,” Alex answers.

They follow the younger Alex out of the building and into Jesse Manes' car. Alex gingerly sits into the passenger seat. “You made the right choice, Alex,” Manes says.

“He didn't force you there?” Isobel asks.

“No. If he'd simply coerced me, the contract would technically have been void. Not that anyone would have believed me over him, but he still wanted to avoid it.”

“What did he do?”

“He gave me a choice. If I enlisted, that day in the shed would be forgotten, and we'd never speak of it again. If I didn't, I'd spend the summer in conversion therapy and Michael...well, if he was found dead in a ditch somewhere, there would be no-one to miss him, you know? He never said it in so many words, of course.”

“That's not a choice,” Isobel points out.

“I did choose it. I wanted to go. The Air Force took me away from his grasp and let me grow into myself. I don't regret that.”

I sobel wants to argue, but she can tell there's no point. Alex isn't factually wrong. “I didn't leave because of him,” Alex adds, sensing her thoughts. “I didn't leave  _for_ him. It was my path. I couldn't stay.”

In the car, Alex waits until they've passed the base's checkpoint to wrangle his left arm into a sling, clearly fighting hard not to show his discomfort. “What's that about?” Isobel asks.

“Broken clavicle,” Alex shrugs. “And three broken ribs. The results of his...unhappiness. Nothing compared to what Michael got.”

Isobel staggers in shock at his casualness. It's not feinted, she can tell in the mindspace. Alex honestly feels like it wasn't that bad.

From the strange out-of-body state that allows them to be in the car in the memory, without actually having a physical presence, they watch as Jesse Manes drops his son at the house and drives away. “He gave me a little more leeway after this,” Alex says. “He'd got what he wanted. It didn't matter what I did until I started basic training.”

Teenage-Alex just lies on his bed for a long while, empty eyes staring at the  ceiling. Isobel is almost surprised at the void, where there should be emotions, there should be rage and grief.

“I was all out,” Alex says. “Sometimes when it gets too much, I just...get out of my body. Stop _feeling._ It's the only way it's bearable.”

Isobel nods. “Dissociation,” she murmurs. “I learned that from you. That's what my blackouts were.”

“I've been doing it for as long as I remember.”

With a tilt of his head, he fast-forwards the memory an hour or so, where teenage-Alex stands back up and starts rummaging through his closet, one-handed. He takes out his guitar and walks out of the house with the case on his good shoulder.

Isobel and present-Alex follow him down the streets of Roswell, looking for someone. Michael, Isobel sees in his mind. Michael who is still homeless, living in his truck, and injured. Alex has to stop five times to rest before he finds him in a back alley behind the Wild Pony's parking lot.

“Alex,” Michael greets him. His eyes catalog Alex's injuries, as Alex does the same. He's sitting on the tail of his truck, a bottle of acetone in hand. Alex doesn't even seem to notice the oddness of that.

“Michael,” Alex rasps out, his voice barely a whisper. He coughs a few times, and almost doubles over from the pain.

“Hey, are you alright?” Michael helps him sit down beside him. Alex nods unconvincingly. Michael pulls his scarf off, revealing his badly bruised neck. “That doesn't look good.”

“It's been checked out,” Alex says. “It's okay. Your hand?”

Michael shrugs.

Alex whimpers and brings their foreheads together. Isobel has to look away, feeling like a voyeur. It looks like they're suddenly breathing again, after a long time underwater. It looks like they're internally screaming for help.

It's altogether too intense.

Alex breaks the spell.  “ If I were to leave Roswell, would you come with me?”

Michael swallows several times before he answers. “I have someone here who needs me,” he says eventually.

Alex just bites his lip and nods, like he expected that answer. The crushing of his last hope just turns his heart to lead.

Isobel feels tears run down her cheeks. “It was me. He was talking about me.”

“He loves you,” present-Alex says. “He loves you so much. You're his family.”

“Did I prevent him from being happy? All these years?”

Alex laughs bitterly. “Isobel, have you seen us? We're both...broken. If we'd run away together that day, we'd never have been happy. We couldn't communicate then, and we still can't. I let myself hope over and over, but maybe it was never possible.”

“I enlisted this morning,” teenage-Alex says, looking at his feet.

The lost look Michael gives him is heartbreaking. “You're really leaving?” he says in a small voice.

“I'm leaving as soon as that's healed,” Alex gestures to his shoulder. “Air Force. I signed the papers.”

“Fuck, Alex, I−” Michael starts, but he trails off, out of words.

Alex holds up the guitar.  “I came to give you this.”

“Your guitar?”

“I won't be using it anymore.”

“What's the point? I'll never be able to play again.” Michael nods to his left hand, cradled against his chest in a makeshift sling, heavily bandaged.

That feels like a punch to Alex's gut. “You won't go to the hospital? You need surgery.”

“I don't have insurance, Alex.”

Alex closes his eyes, as if to give himself courage. He's the reason Michael will never play music again. The one thing Michael confided quietens his mind. The one important thing that they shared.

It's like suddenly saying goodbye is easier than staying. “You don't want it?” he lifts the guitar.

Michael just shakes his head.

“I probably won't see you before I leave,” Alex murmurs. “It's better that way. No point in putting you in more danger for something that won't go anywhere.”

“Alex−”

Alex shakes his head. “For what it's worth, I'm sorry you ever got involved with me.”

Maybe it's because she knows Michael so well, and she's in Alex's head, but the dissonance between them stings Isobel like a wrong note. Or the wrong music entirely.  Michael takes the blow visibly, his emotions always open on his face, and he thinks Alex regrets their relationship. He thinks that to this day, she knows. 

Alex is just so, so sorry for the pain he brought Michael. For the fact that it was him, and it was his father. Alex is sorry for existing, and that his existence hurt someone he loves.

And that, that's something Isobel can't take.

In the blink of an eye, they're back in the Middle Eastern desert, and she didn't even mean to pull them out.  She brutally sits down on the floor. 

“I swore to myself that day that I'd never touch an instrument again,” Alex repeats. “Not when I'd taken that away from Michael. I gave the guitar to Maria before I left, along with everything I had.”

“Alex, you−” Isobel hesitates. “You were _not_ something bad that happened to Michael. You two had the most awful circumstances, but it wasn't _you_.”

“But it was me. And it was him.”

Isobel shakes her head, trying to find a way to get through to him. She wants to show him, Michael's love, what she's seen of it, even if she's not supposed to. The memories she shares with Michael aren't for Alex to see, and yet. She's seeing plenty that weren't ever meant for her eyes. She doesn't think she'll ever look at her brother the same way.

Alex understands her line of thoughts, of course. She's leaking, not in control anymore, she's too rattled. Her own mind is melting into the mindspace. “You shouldn't,” Alex says, but he's curious. Tense, afraid, but he's curious.

Isobel tries to find a memory that wouldn't betray anything important. It can't be Michael's devastation after Alex left−she never understood what it was about, not at the time. But it's too late, Alex is already feeling it. She pulls back hurriedly, and Alex pushes.

Only that's not where they land.

“We're defined by the things we can control.”

Isobel watches in horror. She was thinking about control, and mindspace, and Alex was thinking about Michael, and she's got to pull him out, he can see this, he can't, it won't look right−

“Love is out of control. Love is the worst thing that ever happened to me. And I was in a...spaceship crash.”

Michael has this smile on his face, the one he takes when everything is wrong and he's saying something so harsh, so awful about himself that he can't do anything but smile. Alex knows it like she does, yet different, their interpretation swirling and curling and melting together and the shock−

Isobel chokes. No, Alex chokes.

He's on the floor of the desert, the other desert, and he's dying.

*

“He didn't mean it, Alex. Not like that. Dammit, you weren't supposed to see that!”

Alex grunts. The desert mindscape has morphed into smoke and dust, the building crumbling around them, and Alex is stuck−but it's not a memory. It's happening inside his mind right now, a projection, and Isobel chokes on her breath at the symbolism.

“I'm the worst thing that ever happened to him,” he murmurs, crushed.

“No. That is _not_ what he said, and I know it's not what he meant.”

Alex doesn't answer, turning his head the other way. His whole lower body is pinned down, buried under the rubble, and Isobel can't tell if he really can't move. It feels like a nightmare, with the same unreal quality to it, a nightmare she can't wake up from.

“Alex,” she reaches out for him. Alex flinches away.

Fuck. This wasn't what he needed, not at all. He already thinks he's not worth anything to his friends, to anyone, and in his mind, Isobel's memory just proved that. Worse, that Michael would be better off without him. She scrambles to find something else, something that would−oh.

She forces it, this time. She's still in control, here. The space morphs into her living room, back when all of Noah's things were still around−she shudders at that, but she holds on. The rubble around Alex disappears, but he doesn't move. Isobel can see that his leg is gone again, with no prosthesis to take its place.

She's on the couch, reading, and Michael is sitting at the table in the memory, fiddling with her iPad. He's never had an Internet connection at the Airstream, so she let him come over when he needed to order things online or search for a job.

“What is this?” Alex asks, still making no move to even sit up. His words are sluggish, like he's too spent to even articulate.

“It was about a year and half ago,” Isobel answers.

She can pinpoint the exact moment Michael finds the article. She remembers looking at him at the time, not understanding until she read it himself. “That's when I understood about you two. Before that, I'd just seen you in Michael's head before graduation, and I thought you had a fling back then, but I had no idea he still thought about you.”

Michael looks sick, frozen in front of the screen. “What's wrong?” memory-Isobel asks, standing up to come over.

Michael doesn't answer. Isobel skims the contents of the article−making it immediately available to Alex in the mindspace.  _Local Airman severely injured in Iraq._ “It just said that there were no details available, so it wasn't even clear if you'd make it,” present-Isobel says. Alex opens his mouth and closes it again, shaken.

Her counterpart takes the iPad from Michael's shaking hands and sets it down on the table, before gathering her brother in her arms. “I didn't know about him,” she murmurs.

“I−I didn't tell you,” Michael stammers. His breathing is halting, more panicked with every second. “I can't−if he dies−”

“Michael, he's not dead, okay? I'll make some calls, find out what I can. I'll call Master Sergeant Manes myself if I have to.”

At that, Michael jerks widely, now fully panicked. “No. No, don't−don't call _him_. But−I need to know.”

“Okay, whatever you need. We'll find out, alright?”

Michael nods shakily, letting Isobel hug him. His shaking slowly subsides, turning into sobs. “He can't die,” he murmurs. “He can't.”

In present-Isobel's arms, Alex is sobbing along.

*

A lex racks his brain for something to say that will convince Michael to leave  the prison .  _I love you_ isn't enough.  _I've loved you for a long time_ didn't stop Michael from wanting to leave the planet, Michael knows Alex loves him but love has never stopped anyone from leaving.  _I love you_ is what his mother said when she hugged him goodbye.  _I love you_ isn't strong enough, Alex said  _I love you_ to Rosa and she still died, he said  _I love you_ to Dawson and Karl and they still died, he said  _I love you_ to Maria and Liz and they still grew apart, he said  _I love you_ to his dad−once−and Dad never loved him back. Alex's love has never been enough.

So he racks his brain and he says  _you're my family_ because it's what he's wanted to hear forever, every time his dad said  _no son of mine_ and his brothers looked away. He says  _okay, but you're mine_ because it's the truth at a level that  _I love you_ can never even come close. Michael has been intertwined into his soul weaved in with all the love and the hurt and the pain and the hatred, but he's vital to Alex in a way neither of them fully comprehend. 

But as usual, his words don't mean anything because they're his.  “I don't look away,” he says, because maybe Michael's own words will get through to him. 

It's not enough, and t he only word that convinces Michael is his mother's. Later, Alex hates himself for even thinking like that, but he also knows it's the truth. He's not jealous of Michael's mother, it's not like that. 

It's only much later that he reflects on the whole thing, and he realizes how angry he is. Not at Michael's reaction, in such a bad time, he can't blame Michael for anything, he can only blame himself. But he's finally understood the power of Michael's words. His way of making seemingly grand declarations, to distract from the fact that they're empty as hell.

Metaphors are good for poetry, but they're a terrible way to communicate. They just make you feel guilty for always falling short.

“You don't hate him,” Isobel says.

“No. But when it comes to him, everything's...intense. I can't wrap my head around him, around what I feel for him. If I'm angry, I'm just one step away from exploding, and if I'm scared, I run.”

“Michael doesn't take well to running.”

“I've noticed,” Alex laughs sadly. “I don't know how to do anything else. If I stay, I just… I think of my parents. I can't risk becoming like _him_.”

“Alex, you're nothing like him.”

“I'm angry. I'm always angry, when I'm not just numb. I'm not usually angry at Michael, just at the world, but they say that people who've been abused become abusers easily.”

“I've heard that,” Isobel says. “And you know what? I'm afraid of it too. Every time I even touch someone's mind, every time I think about getting close to someone again, even you, hell every time I see Rosa. I'm terrified that I'll become like _him_. Mine and yours aren't the same person and they didn't do the same things, but they've both made us afraid of ourselves. They both made us think that everything bad that happened was our fault.”

She scoots closer and lays a hand on the back of Alex's neck, gently. He doesn't flinch.

“They were wrong. You're the one that taught me that, Alex. They. Were. Wrong. They lied to us about _everything_.”

“My father raised me,” Alex murmurs. “He shaped me. Doesn't that just mean I can't trust anything I think I am? That _I_ am a lie?”

Isobel shakes her head. “Noah was in my body. In my head. I don't know what thoughts were mine or his, what remains of him in me.  I lied to him and he lied to me for so long that I don't even know what the truth was all that time. Am I a lie?”

Alex meets her eyes. “No. Because you're here. Now. You're not a lie, Isobel.”

“And you're here, now. You are not a lie, Alex Manes. You're a person. You deserve to exist.”

Alex sobs, and the link breaks as he pulls away. Isobel sits back in the dark bedroom, and throws up bile.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We move away from Malex for a bit and into other aspects of Alex's issues.
> 
> Specific warnings for this chapter: lengthy description and discussion of eating disorders, description of child abuse (through withholding food), mentions of torture and sexual abuse (Caulfield, plus Noah), mentions of murder and basically genocide (Caulfield), mentions of war and civilian victims of war.  
> Note: if you're hesitant reading this chapter (or any other, the last few will have a lot of TWs) because of a specific trigger, you're welcome to contact me on Tumblr or in a comment here, I can tell you which part of chapters to avoid or if something specific will come up.

Isobel is taken straight into a memory when she gets into Alex's mind again. She's taken her time, gone home to eat and change and let Kyle tend to Alex's injuries.

“Sorry,” Alex tells her. “Kyle tried to get me to eat, and I was thinking about him.”

They're in the Project Shepard bunker, Isobel recognizes. Alex is sitting in front of a half-dozen screens.

“He told me you didn't eat anything,” she says, probing to see how much Alex is willing to talk.

“Yeah. I tried, but...even just looking at food makes me nauseous. I can't stand the thought of putting it in my mouth.”

Isobel bites her lip. “That's what we're here to work on, right? So show me.”

Alex makes a gesture to look at the door.

“Hey,” Kyle calls, walking into the Project Shepard bunker. “You've been here for hours. You should eat.”

“In a minute,” memory-Alex answers, not tearing his eyes away from his screens.

“Don't look at the screens,” present-Alex tells Isobel. “You don't want to see that.”

“What is it?”

“The video surveillance from Caulfield. It's basically hundreds of hours of alien torture. Seriously, don't put yourself through that.”

“You did,” Isobel points out.

“Yeah, and you don't need to subject yourself to it too. I can give you a summary, if we really need to. I don't think the actual content of the files was instrumental in my...issues.”

Isobel hesitates. “The aliens there, they were like me, though. I feel like I ought to know. Like I need to remember, for them.”

“Look, Isobel, they were tortured for seventy years in there. They were experimented on, and abused in all the ways you can imagine. You really don't need that burden.”

Isobel nods slowly. She's not ready to let this go fully, but it's not why they're here. She'll ask Alex again later, maybe. When the situation is different.

“I thought you'd say that again, so I brought you a sandwich,” Kyle says, back in the memory.

Alex doesn't look up when Kyle puts the sandwich down by his elbow, still staring at the screen.

“I still can't believe my father was a part of all this,” Kyle says, dropping into a chair and starting on his own sandwich. Alex feels sick at the smell of it, watching a person strapped down to a table and brutalized. Isobel tries to keep her eyes off the screen, but this is Alex's mind. The knowledge permeates her all the same, and she feels sick, too. “After the first decade or so, they'd pretty much done all the experiments they could, at least until DNA sequencing came along,” present-Alex explains. “Soldiers stuck being prison guards for helpless victims get creative with their entertainment, and there was no one to canalize them.”

Isobel swallows. “You watched all that?”

“I skipped the thousands of hours of the prisoners in their cells, but I watched the rest just in case it could give me something to help you with Max,” Alex answers. “Most of it on fast-forward, but I still got the gist of it. There were several hundreds aliens taken from the crash site. When we made it to Caulfield, there were fourteen left.”

Isobel feels like she'll never get the image out of her head. Or maybe Alex does. It's burned into his brain, the thing he sees when he closes his eyes. Or one of many things, competing with exploding buildings and people bleeding out and−

How can he have so many horrors in his mind and still survive?

“Jim wasn't a bad man,” Alex says, and it feels like a rehearsed speech. “He just got caught up in something bigger than him.”

“We had some version of that conversation nearly everyday for two months,” present-Alex adds.

“He still participated,” Kyle says. “I can't forgive him for that. For the alcohol, for cheating on my mom, maybe, but not for that. He was...it's so...monstrous.”

“My father is the monster, Kyle, not yours. Jim was blackmailed, and eventually murdered, because he tried to get out. I know it's hard, you're grieving for the man you thought he was, but you shouldn't judge him too harshly.”

“I just−” Kyle starts.

Alex sighs, and finally tears himself away from his screen to reach over and pat his friend on the shoulder. “Let me do the work,” he says. “I have more time than you anyway, and I can spot inconsistencies better. You don't need to be down here.”

“You can't do it all alone.”

“Sure I can. I'm technically on vacation until my official discharge, so I have plenty of time. Seriously, let me worry about it.”

Kyle looks conflicted, but he relents. “I need to go back to work, but remember to eat, alright?”

Alex nods and smiles tightly. “Go. I'll handle this. Liz and Michael probably need you more.”

He watches Kyle walk out, throwing one last look over his shoulder, and turns back to the screen.

The sandwich lays on the desk, forgotten.

*

“That's how it started? The food issues?” Isobel asks.

Alex shrugs. “When I stopped working, I just kept forgetting. I've had a strict framework my all life, always the same. My father operated the house the way he did a squadron. I had issues with food before, but it forced me to eat at least one meal a day consistently. Without that, in the middle of all the work I had to do, I just forgot.”

“You had food issues before?”

“Yes,” Alex sighs. “First as a teenager, then again later after my second tour.”

“Were you ever diagnosed with an eating disorder?”

Alex shakes his head. “My father didn't bring me to a doctor, he just used it as another excuse to beat me up. Or force-feed me, which was...unpleasant. The other time, I was living on base and I could see myself having issues, so I got a friend to take me to the mess hall every day so I would at least eat something. It helped.”

Isobel takes a moment to put her thoughts into words. “You've gone too far for that this time, haven't you?”

“Probably,” Alex dips his head in shame.

Isobel reaches for his hand. “Hey, there's no shame to be had. But eating disorders...I think a lot of them are about control, at first. Trying to get control of your body, because you can't control the rest of your life. At least that's what it was for me.”

“For you?” Alex asks. He opens his mouth in realization. “After Noah. That's what it was. I should have recognized it.”

“He took so much control from me,” Isobel says, bringing her knees up to her chin. “After−after he died, I wanted to−I needed to feel like I could control _something_. Even if it wasn't healthy. But you didn't let me. You brought me back before it got too bad.”

“I didn't even−”

“Last time was worse. When I was fourteen. I was...assaulted. Max−I don't know if you know that, but Max killed the guy, and Michael covered it up.”

“Another cover-up?” Alex's eyes widen.

“The first one,” Isobel nods. “We're messes, all of us. It's when I started dissociating so badly that Noah could borrow my body.”

Alex closes his eyes and sighs.

“I didn't know what was happening to me, and around the same time my body was...developing and I was terrified of it, I didn't know if I'd develop the same way as other girls, I didn't even _feel_ like a girl−”

Alex frowns. “Are you−”

Isobel shrugs.  “I don't know. Agender, maybe. I could never quite figure out if it's because I'm an alien,  so I don't really have a word for it .  Anyway, I scrambled to take back some kind of control and it ended up being my weight. Plus some kind of OCD, I think.  It took me years to eat properly again. ”

A lex bites his lip and looks away. Isobel waits, trying to give him time to gather his thoughts.

“I don't know if it's about control,” he says after a while, still not looking at her. “It's not about how much I weigh, I know that, I've never really cared about that beyond trying to stay fit. Though weighing myself after losing my leg was a real shock.”

Isobel grimaces. It's one more thing she'd never thought about.

“How does it make you feel?” she asks. “Trying to force yourself to eat?”

“Just sick. Like...like I can't stand the thought of food.”

“All food? Or are some types of food worse?”

Alex thinks about it. “I don't think so. Just anything. Protein bars are a bit easier, so that's what I ate for a while.”

“Things you don't have to prepare,” Isobel points out.

“There were always protein bars around at home, so I'd sneak into the kitchen and steal some,” Alex remembers. “For when my father punished me.”

“Wait, he punished you with food?”

Alex shakes his head. “Not exactly.  He'd...if we failed to accomplish a task, he'd send us to our room without dinner, or make us finish it before we could eat. But that's something all parents do, right? I've definitely read about it.”

“How often are we talking about?”

“Uh, it was something that was the same for all four of us, I don't know, a few times a week? I was the youngest, so when he'd pit us against each other, I almost always lost.”

“And he wouldn't let you eat,” Isobel finishes disbelievingly. “So you stole protein bars.”

Alex nods.

“Alex, look...I'm not a parent or an expert in education, but I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to let your children be hungry. If you were so hungry that you stole food, I don't think that's anywhere near normal.”

Alex deflates. “I don't know,” he murmurs. “He would...he'd say that we had to earn it. We had to earn everything, the right to eat, to play, sometimes to sleep in a bed. There was this obstacle course in the backyard for a few years, he'd make us run it once a day.”

He gestures, and the landscape changes again.

*

I sobel remembers hunger. 

The pain in his tummy, the little noises Alex tries to hide as he races through the course. Up the pole. Inside the tunnel, dark and dirty. His knees in the mud. There's mud everywhere. It's late fall, and he's cold, without a proper coat on. Mom isn't here to make sure he puts his coat on anymore.

“How old are you?”

“Nine, maybe? It started a couple of years after Mom left, and didn't stop until Flint enlisted.”

“Come on, Alex,” a very young Flint is encouraging him. “If you don't make it in under half an hour, he's going to make you run it a third time.”

Alex squeezes out of the tunnel, out of breath. Covered in mud, he hoists himself up a knotted rope, over the frame of an old swing, and back down another rope. “That looks dangerous,” Isobel says.

“Yeah, I broke a few bones falling off at first. I got good at it pretty fast though. I breezed through basic training, because I'd been completing harder versions of every test since I was eight.”

Little Alex  jumps off his rope and sprints back to the house. “Thirty-two minutes,” Jesse Manes announces, looking at a stopwatch. “ You failed again.  No dinner for you. Boys, get cleaned up and ready.”

“I'm hungry,” Alex complains, though in a very low voice.

“You can run it again if you want to eat, but it will be dark by the time you're finished,” Jesse says.

Alex whimpers. Shoulders slumped, he passes by his father and removes his shoes. Jesse Manes slams his heel into the ground. Alex immediately stands at attention.

“Go to your room. Don't put mud anywhere, or you'll regret it.”

“Yes, sir,” Alex salutes−as sharply as an uncoordinated nine year old could be expected to.

The room he shares with Flint is pristine, without a single toy or book on the floor. The beds have military corners, Isobel notices, wincing internally. Did Jesse Manes really run his house like this for decades without anyone noticing?

Alex carefully undresses, folding his clothes so all the mud is on the inside, and  puts on what looks like pajamas. With a forlorn look at the door, he slips into his bed and picks up the book on his nightstand, but the hunger is too strong, he can't focus on reading. He whimpers again, holding his tummy. “I probably didn't eat lunch either,” present-Alex says. “He only made us run the course more than once on weekends.”

“So you weren't allowed to eat all day, but you still had to run?”

Alex shrugs. Isobel closes her eyes, dismayed. He doesn't even truly seem to see how far from healthy it is.

“When you forget to eat,” she starts on a hunch. “Is it because you're not done with your task?”

Alex looks at her in surprise. He frowns, thinking, and they're back to the Project Shepard bunker. Kyle is not there, but Alex is sitting in the same position in front of the screens, watching another video. He massages his thigh absently.

The alien being tortured in the video is a woman, and Isobel can tell there's something special about her. Memory-Alex and present-Alex both look sick, transfixed by the image.

“This is Michael's mother,” Isobel understands. Of course. Alex would have been looking for information about her.

“All I ever found was that they took a sick pleasure in sexually abusing her,” present-Alex says, looking on the verge of throwing up.

Isobel swallows. Memory-Alex gets to the end of one video and closes it, going back to the folder on the hard drive. He looks at the time−nearly 2pm−and hesitates, then opens the next file. “I didn't want to stop,” present-Alex says. “I didn't know if I'd be able to start again.”

“How many files were there?”

“Three decades of footage. I went fast, but it took me a fortnight just to watch the ones with Michael's mother.”

Memory-Alex pauses a while later, as his stomach starts growling, but he simply drinks from his water bottle and keeps going. The bunker doesn't have windows, but Isobel keeps an eye on the time, displayed on one of the monitors, and sees it pass into evening, then night. “When did you stop?” she asks. “You didn't eat all day, did you?”

“I fell asleep at the desk, I believe. It was a common occurrence whenever Kyle wasn't around.”

“And when he was?”

“He'd force me to go home and get a few hours of sleep and a shower.” In the memory, Alex is more and more restless, digging into his thigh and squirming on his chair. After a while−3am, apparently−he takes a break to remove his pants and unhook his prosthesis. He just continues after that, in his underwear, until he falls asleep on his keyboard.

Isobel doesn't even bother commenting on how unhealthy that must have been, because she can see present-Alex wincing at the memory.

They go through several more instances of Alex falling asleep in the bunker, or dissociating out of pure exhaustion and horror at the videos. He's eating less than once a day, Isobel calculates, and even then only a few bites when Kyle brings him food. He goes home in the morning to shower−more for appearances than for himself−and walk Buffy,  but on the days he spends at the bunker, which is most of them, he barely sleeps or moves away from the screen.

“You're not just forgetting to eat,” Isobel notices after a while. “You're actively avoiding it.”

Alex dips his head in shame.

“Why?” Isobel pushes.

“I didn't feel like eating. Just...made me feel sick.”

“No, it's not just that. When you're like this, how does it make you feel?”

A lex is silent for a moment. He opens his mouth to speak several times, but closes it again.

“Just tell me,” Isobel murmurs in encouragement.

“Like−like I don't deserve it,” Alex sighs. “There's still work to be done, and I haven't earned it yet.”

Isobel closes her eyes, trying to focus them on that feeling. “So it's tied to work? Or to guilt?”

The strength of t he backlash takes her by surprise. That's it. She's shaken the knot, and now it's hitting them in the face.

Guilt.

“What do you feel guilty about, Alex?”

Alex crosses his arms around his chest, making himself small. “I don't know,” he murmurs.

“You know,” Isobel decides to push. They need to get to the bottom of this. This is where the block is, she's almost certain.

“I don't−”

*

“That's the coldest reality about war. Sometimes you're just doing what you're told. Then all of a sudden, things are burning. People are screaming. And then you look around, and you realize that the evil is you.”

Kyle swallows hard, and Alex feels cold.

“They had a alien in there who could give people brain tumor,” Kyle says after a silence.

Alex's first reaction is anger that Kyle won't understand that the aliens aren't evil−before he realize what Kyle is implying. Jim Valenti died of a brain tumor. After he, seemingly, tried to disentangle himself from this mess. Which means−

It doesn't take Alex long to understand, and he almost throws up right there.

His father killed his best friend's dad. His father's actions killed Michael's mom, Michael entire family, after keeping them prisoners for decades. His family nearly wiped out an entire race, and his father killed yet another person Alex knew, a person who tried his best, however little that was, to protect Alex.

“You think my father−”

“I mean, it's possible, isn't it?”

Kyle is still thinking in possibilities, and that's why he could never survive a war. Jim would have been like that, too, ready to see the good in people even when it isn't there.

“We grabbed the security footage. We'll check. And then we'll have to talk about how to protect you from him,” Alex says slowly.

It's just another debt to pay, on top of all the ones he already has. His family has destroyed so many lives, and he'll do what little he can to make it right.

Not that it ever will be.

*

“You need to eat, son,” the sergeant says, putting a tray down on Alex's bunk bed.

The man has the same rank as Jesse Manes, but he never speaks to Alex the way his father does. He's kind, always looking out for the new recruits. Alex technically outranks him, now that he's an officer, but the sergeant has fifteen years on him.

“I'm not hungry, sir,” Alex says without looking up.

The sergeant grunts and sits down on the opposite bed. “You couldn't have known, son.”

“It doesn't make it feel any better,” Alex shrugs.

“I know it doesn't. But you can't beat yourself up too much.”

Alex looks up at that. “How can I not? It's one thing to hurt or kill people who are trying to kill us. This is different.”

It replays endlessly in his mind, the satellite footage of the compound, the confirmed heat signatures, and then−there must have been a basement or something, a fallout shelter, he still doesn't know, but suddenly the insurgents weren't alone. Suddenly there was a woman on his screen, a child−but it was too late.

There's no sound, not even a proper picture−the satellite only sends one image every second−but Alex knows what he's done. He's ordered a drone strike on civilians.

“Eat,” the sergeant says kindly.

Alex shakes his head. He can't get over the nausea, but more than that, the voice of his father in his head.  _You failed again. No dinner for you, Alex._

His father would probably think this experience makes him more of a man, not less.

That just makes it worse.

*

The first time Alex throws up his food is e ight days after Caulfield.

He comes to the Wild Pony to see Maria for the first time in days, after the mess with Max and Rosa, and he catches the tail of Michael's alien reveal.

“Will you still want me, now that you know I'm not even human?” Michael asks Maria, and Alex doesn't want to understand what that means, but he knows.

“What about Alex?” Maria confirms it.

“I...I loved him for a long time, but we just keep hurting each other. I'm done. I'm ready to move on.”

“He loves you,” Maria says, still resisting.

“I know, but his family literally exterminated mine,” Michael shrugs. “And he's...I don't know. Love is not enough between us. Not anymore.”

Alex doesn't walk in. He runs back to his car, but he barely make it there before he has to empty his stomach on the ground of the parking lot.

He's walked away too many times. He hasn't known how to tell Michael he loved him.

He's too late.

_But I love you!_ comes a distant memory.

_It's not enough anymore, Jesse. I'm sorry, but you just keep hurting everyone you love._

At six years old, Alex didn't know what it meant, when his mother packed up a suitcase and hugged him goodbye.

Now he does.

His love isn't good enough.

His life isn't good enough, if he's going to become his father.

It's already all he can see in the mirror.

_*_

The Iraqi desert is a comfort of sorts, these days.

In the seventeen hours he was trapped back there, Alex never felt hunger. Your body doesn't cry for food, when it knows it's going to die. It reverts back to simpler needs.

Warmth.

Peace.

Sleep.

Isobel blinks, and she's looking at the bundle of sheets again, in the dark bedroom.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're already on chapter 8! I can't believe how long this story has gotten. There will be most likely two more chapters (so a total of 10). I won't post a chapter tomorrow, since it's airing day, and also because I still have to write about half of the next chapter, but I'll be back on Tuesday if all goes well.
> 
> Specific warnings: this chapters deals heavily with Jesse Manes, though he's not technically there, so heavy warning for discussion of abuse. Graphic description of abuse are something that I've tried to avoid however dark things got, but things are heavily implied. Warnings also for death and funerals, Alex going back to his childhood home, hospitals and coma, the complexity of mourning of abuser, eating disorders and weight loss, and non-graphic discussion of Caulfield and war.

“I don't even know why I keep coming here.” Alex sits down carefully in the armchair by the bed, setting aside his crutches. “Kyle says you probably can't hear me, and honestly I prefer it that way.”

Jesse Manes doesn't stir. He lies still, eyes closed, his chest moving at the rhythm of the ventilator's huff. He looks almost relaxed in sleep, the most relaxed Alex has ever seen him.  The neurologist says he probably won't wake up from his coma, something about neurological damage f rom a blow to the head . Kyle is devastated. Alex is glad.

“I had an appointment with my prosthesist today,” Alex says. “She says she can't book me for a new fitting until my weight has been stable for at least a month. She says...” Alex trails off, looking out the window. “She says I've lost too much muscle strength to handle a prosthesis anyway, so there's no point. Getting back on two feet will take months of PT, even if I manage to stop losing weight.”

The plastic chair is uncomfortable. Alex squirms in it, but he can't find a position that doesn't hurt. The weight loss did this, along with making him permanently cold. Pain is an old friend, but now nothing's comfortable anymore, not even Jim's old armchair in the cabin.

“I'm fucking tired of PT. I'm fucking tired of having to work so much just to have a barely functioning body. I'm tired of forcing myself to eat even a little bit. I'm just...I'm fucking tired, Dad. Of everything.”

The machines keep beeping, without any input from Jesse himself. There's no one left here, just the shell of a man who once took pleasure in damaging the body Alex is so tired of. He remembers the feel of the fists against his skin, the belt buckle that often drew blood, the fingers that took the breath out of him.

These hands are still, now. The only r eality left of Jesse's abuse is in Alex's mind.

“I want to hate you,” Alex murmurs. “I do, to some extent. I hate the person you were, I really, really hate what you did to Michael and to his family. You're a monster, Dad. There's no other word for it. You think that _they_ are the monsters, and yet you can't see what you've become.”

Isobel watches the Alex in the memory cross his arms around his chest tightly. He's cold, but mostly he's touch-deprived. She wants to give him a hug, but present-Alex stands away from her, and she knows it's on purpose.

He's confronting his abuser, in a way. She got a confrontation with Noah before he died, in the mindspace. It wasn't satisfying or liberating, but she thinks it helped. It helped her see the monster, and let go of the man she loved, just a little.

But then again, Jesse Manes never hid the monster from Alex. The ugliness. Alex saw it all, and he drank it in because he was a child who didn't know any better. He rejected it with all his heart, and yet still internalized it.

“I've been wondering about something for a while,” Alex continues. “Where it all comes from. What made you this way. I watched so many surveillance videos from Caulfield, I read the reports that date back even before that, and I know that your father, and your grandfather before him, they were just the same. They imprisoned and abused innocent aliens, _people_ who are just like us. Did they abuse their sons, too? Did your father hit you? I think he did. I think Junior will probably hit Harlan, when he's old enough to do mischief. I think Greg and Flint won't think anything of it.”

Harlan is Alex's two-year-old nephew, Isobel gathers from his mind. Alex has never met him. He hasn't spoken to his brother in years, apart from one phone conversation while he was in the hospital.

“You probably weren't born a monster. Mimi told me that you changed, at some point. You discovered the horror of what your family was doing, and you chose to continue it. I want to say that I don't understand it, but I kind of do.”

Alex sighs. Isobel holds her breath, afraid of what's to come.

“You sent me to war. I was a good Airman. I developed valuable skills, and I led men into combat. I served my country.” Alex's mouth turns bitter. “I did what I was told to do, and I did it well. I killed people. Afghans, Iraqis, wherever they were from, people who didn't ask for a war anymore than I did, who probably had less choice than I did in participating. Caulfield was a government-led program, not that different from what I saw overseas. The aliens didn't ask for a war either. So yes, I do understand. Because I'm already like you.”

Alex is rocking in his chair by now, still hugging himself tightly.

“I worked hard to dismantle your legacy, Dad. I'm almost done. It won't undo the hurt, but there will be nothing left. I want to be happy about that, but I'm not.” His voice breaks. “You... _We_ caused so much pain, so many deaths. How am I supposed to go on, Dad? How do I live with that?”

*

Alex groans as the buzzing starts again. He turns in his bed, and goes to press his hand against his ear, when some part of his brain realizes it comes from him phone. Someone is trying to reach him, insistently. And given that he's fairly sure he's switched his phone to silent at some point, it's one of his there emergency numbers. Michael, Kyle, or the hospital.

He almost doesn't answer, putting his money on Kyle wanting to check on him. The other man has been here far too often recently. He's mother-henning, and Alex hates it. He doesn't need anyone's concern.

But he still takes a look at the screen, when the phone starts buzzing for the third time. It's not Kyle. It's the hospital.

Panic rising in his chest, Alex reaches for the phone, almost knocking it off the nightstand in the process. A look at the time tells him it's nearly 11 am—but he worked well into the night.

"Hello?" he asks, bringing the phone to his ear. The simple move shouldn't make his muscles burn like it does, but it doesn't matter right now.

The doctor calling—Alex recognizes her voice, he thinks—goes rapidly through the usual polite greetings, which Alex tunes off. "What happened?" he asks.

The answer makes him drop the phone entirely. He fumbles to pick it back up, ending the call with clipped words—"I'll be right there,"—all the while gasping for air.

Even when he's dressed and situated on his crutches, almost breathing normally, nearly half an hour later—it took him this long to get out of bed—he knows driving is reckless. He doesn't see another solution, though. The left foot pedal is still fitted in his car, thankfully, because his prosthesis doesn't fit anymore even with several socks, and he's still waiting on his specialist appointment—and dreading it more than a little, because he knows what the doctor is going to say. He's lost too much weight and muscle mass for his residual limb to handle a prosthesis.

At least the road is deserted. If he crashes, he won't hurt anyone else.

He's the only one of his brothers living in Roswell, so he's the one who's taken to the morgue, to see his father's body. He's the one who has to handle calling his brothers and organizing the funeral. He does all of it in a daze, at each moment one step away from falling over.

Jesse Manes doesn't look peaceful, under the white sheet. He looks like he died in pain, and Alex wants to spit at his face and scream and kick his body and cry himself to sleep. Those all require more energy than he actually has, not to mention more privacy, so he just stoically stands by the table and dissociates so far he can't even feel the pain.

“Alex?” Kyle calls after him in a hospital corridor, and Alex knows that he heard simply from the tenseness of his shoulders. “I'm sorry.”

Alex takes a breath. Kyle will stick to politeness whenever he doesn't know what to say, and he talks to people who've just lost family often enough. It doesn't matter that it doesn't apply to Alex, not in this case. To the outside world, it does.

Except… Except it really, really doesn't. Condolences are the last think Alex wants to hear, though he knows he'll get plenty in the coming days. But from Kyle, this  _I'm sorry_ is something completely different. It's the only warning Alex gets of his friend fully coming apart.

So he still has one brother to join−Gregory is notoriously hard to reach−and to much paperwork to do, and he can barely even stand, but when Alex gets an armful of his sobbing friend, he supports Kyle to an empty room and sits him down.

“I killed him,” Kyle repeats, over and over. “I'm a murderer.”

“He was a monster,” Alex said. “And he tried to kill you.” _He deserved to be killed_ , he doesn't add, because that's something Kyle will never come to terms with. 

Kyle buries his face in his hands and sobs some more. “How can I still be a doctor?” he murmurs. “I fucking killed him.”

Alex tries to make his face do something that looks like compassion, like forgiveness, but he doesn't think he succeeds very much.

“I don't blame you,” he says instead. “You just defended yourself.”

Kyle shakes his head.

“I know it hurts,” Alex says. “I know what it feels like. Like you'll never be okay with this, with yourself, like you're going to walk around with 'murderer' written on your face. But it's not true, Kyle. You're not the monster here. He attacked you.”

Repeating that isn't helping Kyle, though, so Alex just hugs him until he stops sobbing.

When he stands back up and composes himself, Kyle can't look Alex in the eyes. Alex wonders if he, too, sees Jesse Manes in his face.

Alex doesn't know what to feel. He doesn't feel anything. Not yet.

*

The shouting match with his brothers is the very last thing Alex needs, and the one he's been waiting for for the last three days.

“So you're telling me Dad ending up in the hospital the day after you managed to _blow up_ Caulfield is a coincidence? I'm not stupid, Alex!” Flint is on the verge of hitting something, and Alex is hyperaware of his own vulnerability. He shifts on his crutches so that his back is close to the wall, so that at least he won't fall with the first blow. He'd rather avoid a full fight, but none of his brothers are known pacifists. 

“He was in Niger,” Alex says as calmly as he dare. Too calm might set Flint off entirely. “I didn't even know he was back in the states until the hospital called me.”

That's not exactly true, but Kyle and him have long agreed on their version of the events of that day. Pining Jesse Manes's blow to the head and subsequent brain hemorrhage on Roswell's resident serial killer was easy enough. Alex had nothing to do with it, and Kyle was simply the one who found Jesse.

“Valenti's your friend, and he's got the sheriff in his pocket,” Flint spits out.

“Oh, because Dad didn't? Do you even know how Jim Valenti died?”

Alex can see on Flint's face that he does know. He wants to hit his head against the wall in f rustration .

“Flint, are you saying that Alex was the one who killed Dad?” Gregory asks. 

Alex doesn't want to risk all three of his brothers ganging up on him, so he decides to stop the conversation there. “I can't say I'm sad that he's dead, but I had nothing to do with it,” he says, his tone final. The fact that this conversation−and the entire wake−is taking place in his childhood home, the one that now only has Dad's stuff around, is not helping his mood. He's been jittery and nauseous ever since Dad died.

Who is he even kidding? He's been jittery and nauseous for months. He's just passed the stage where he could still hide it from the world.

“One of you stay here tonight,” he says. “I'm going home. I'll see you at the funeral.”

He wouldn't have put it past his brothers to trip his crutches and make him fall, but they stay frozen in place as he gets out. Alex doesn't breathe until he's in his car.

*

“You have a great relationship with your brothers,” Isobel sneers.

“Not every brother is willing to throw away their life to cover up a murder for you,” Alex says without thinking. He knows how callous this is−he also knows, here where they share every thought, that Isobel is advanced enough in her recovery to take this for what it is.

“And lie to you about said murder for ten years?” Isobel answers in the same sarcastic tone. “I almost envy you your brothers.”

“They just covered up what my father did,” Alex shrugs. “To be fair, he fucked them up as much as he did me. Maybe he didn't abuse them as much physically, but he ruined them all the same.”

Isobel bites her lip. “That's not an excuse, though. You turned out so much better.”

“Maybe. Maybe I had the right friends at the right time. Maybe he went too far with me and that's why I stopped believing his bullshit. I'm just as messed up as they are, though. More, even. At least they're functioning adults.”

“It's not the same. I think you know that. You recognize you have mental issues, you're trying to work on them. You do everything you can to avoid hurting anyone else in the process. That's huge, Alex. Knowing what I know about you, now...it's incredible.”

“If only,” Alex says bitterly. “I keep hurting everyone. I keep… I should be able to take care of this on my own, and yet, here you are… I'm worrying Kyle, and making you do this, when we don't even know if it's going to do any good. All because I can't fucking make myself _eat_.”

“Alex−”

“Save it,” Alex stops her. “I know.”

“I know you know. But I'll keep telling you as long as you need to hear it, okay? We're your friends. I needed help after Noah, and you were here. Why should it be different when it's you?”

“Because...” Alex trails off. Because it's him, and he's not allowed to need help. He knows exactly how that sounds, and yet he can't make his brain think otherwise. He can't need help, because then he becomes a burden.

*

T he funeral is a nightmare. 

Alex still hasn't managed to feel a single thing since he drove to the hospital four days ago. That includes hunger and thirst, so he's had to put actual reminders in his phone to remember to drink. He's given up on food.  His Air Force dress blues hang on him like rags with how much weight he's lost, and he's  acutely  aware of how pitiful he must look next to his brothers' dignity, the  injured brother, the black ship of the family.

There's a flag on his father's coffin, and all Alex can think about is that Jesse Manes didn't deserve it. Or maybe he did. Maybe Jesse Manes is a fair product of America, of humanity in its entirety, and it can all be summed up to hate. Maybe that's what's so wrong with the world.

Alex can feel the eyes on his pinned up pant leg and his crutches as people come to shake his and his brothers' hands and offer condolences. He wants to be far away from here. He hears the pity in their voice, and none of the condolences sound sincere. Jesse Manes gets a full military funeral, and there are no tears shed for him, except perhaps in the privacy of his family's homes.

Kyle looks distinctly sick as approaches them, and his palm is sweaty. Alex pulls him in for a hug, not for himself, but for his friend. Isobel stays behind, and Alex thinks that the last funeral he went to was for her husband. He wonders if she felt the same  chasm open under her feet.

“I did,” present-Isobel confirms. “We both buried our abusers. It should have been ground for celebration.”

“Are you happy that he's dead?” Alex asks.

“Now I am. At the time I was too numb to even understand.”

Numb. That's what Alex feels, throughout the ceremony, and later. He welcomes people into his family home again, and throws up bile in the toilet. He doesn't touch the buffet.

He keeps an eye on Kyle, and finally tells his friend to go home before he breaks down and tries to admit he killed Jesse or something. Alex's brothers are hovering too close, hoping for either of them to incriminate themselves. He's torn to let his friend leave on his own, but he doesn't think he can get away with following him, so he sends Liz a text instead.

Isobel is the only one who thinks to offer A lex a chair.  She doesn't stay long, just enough to hug him tight and make him sit down.

“I should have seen just how bad you were,” present-Isobel comments. “How did we all miss it?” 

“You had so much to deal with already,” Alex answers.

_Yeah, but we've been awful friends_ , Isobel thinks.  _He was skin and bones, and not one of us thought to worry about that._

“I didn't make it easy for you,” Alex says.

Isobel turns to him sharply. “I didn't mean for you to hear that.”

“I know. Your shield dropped. It's okay. You've been hearing all of my thoughts, it's only fair that I get to hear yours.”

“I kept it up so I wouldn't hurt you more,” Isobel explains, reeling that Alex even noticed the shield. “We can't control what goes on through our head. I've learned how to make sense of it, dig out the real thought, but you haven't.”

“It's okay,” Alex repeats. “I've heard it all before.”

*

By some miracle, Alex doesn't collapse until he's finally home, though he nearly falls asleep driving back to the cabin.

He hasn't slept a wink in four days. He hasn't eaten in longer. He needs to get a handle on this, or he's heading right for the gutter.

Only the gutter doesn't sound all that bad right now.

For hours, he lies on his bed in his funeral clothes. He's too far gone to feel hunger, or pain, or fatigue. His skin still crawls from the insincere handshakes and the painful hugs, even though he can barely feel the sheets under his body. He craves skin contact just as badly as he can't stand the thought of it.

Jesse Manes is dead.

The man who abused him−and it's only now that Alex can even think that word−the man who abused him, who _shaped_ him, is gone.

_What do I do now?_

Who is Alex, outside his father? His family legacy? He finished wrapping up his full report on the Project Shepard and Caulfield just a week before his father died. It does nothing to erase what his family has done, but it's as far as Alex can go to make it right.

He's completed his mission, and yet he doesn't feel like he deserves to move on.

Who is he, removed from what Jesse Manes made of him?

_No one,_ says a voice that almost sounds like Michael. Alex feels sick, and then that, too, dissipate s into the numbness.

Alex never thought he'd survive his father. The idea never even crossed his mind. He saw himself die in combat, and he hasn't been truly alive since.

_What do I do now?_


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Several days later than promised, here's chapter 9. The end of this story is rough to write, and the last few days have been...complicated. I hope everyone's doing okay.
> 
> Specific warnings: suicide ideation and mentions, mentions of child abuse, mentions of domestic abuse and murder, bullying, homophobia, anxiety attack.

“What was your childhood like?” Isobel asks softly. Alex has been staring into space for a while, since he showed her Jesse Manes' funeral, and she can't seem to shake him out of his apathy. This loss, the loss of his sense of self, is one of the strongest things that has come off from everything she's seen. She doesn't know what to do with it. She doesn't know how to help, because how can she show Alex that he's worth it? That he's worth fighting for? It looks like no-one has ever fought for him. “Beside your father. Did you have anyone?”

“Sometimes,” Alex answers absently. “They all left eventually.”

The mindscape changes from the desert to something else. The memory is fuzzy and seems to go in and out, time behaving strangely, people moving close to them and then away, disappearing into nothing. Isobel understands when she sees how small Alex is, looking around him with huge dark eyes, hanging onto his mother's hand.

She's had glimpses of his mother before, more impressions than memories, but this is the clearest so far. The woman is tall−probably taller in the memory than she is in real life−with long and thick dark hair. She looks young, barely old enough to have four children of her own.

“What is this?” Isobel asks. The landscape is almost impossible to make out, but there are people around them, dark moving masses with no faces.

“A funeral,” Alex answers. “I must have been about six, it wasn't long before Mom left. I don't really remember.”

“Whose funeral?” Isobel frowns.

“Mom's cousin. This is one of the only times I went on the Rez with her. She'd go every other weekend, but she never brought any of us.”

“Why?”

Alex shrugs. “Dad didn't want us raised in her culture, I think. And Mom's family thought we were too...white, probably. I was too young to understand.”

His mother holds him and Flint by the hand, tightly. Too tightly. Alex wants to run off and explore this place he doesn't know, but she won't let him. She keeps checking his scratchy suit and telling him to be quiet.

“Mom, why is Nascha dead?” Flint asks. He's two years older than Alex, old enough to understand why they're here. Alex doesn't quite remember the words, and Isobel can see that this is a conversation pieced back from several memories, by how unstable it is. Memories from childhood are strange like that.

“She was killed by a bad man,” Mom says quietly, after shushing Flint. “He was her boyfriend, and he was hit her very hard.”

“He hit her?” Alex asks. “Mommy, are you going to die too?”

He has the innocence and the worry of a small child, and Isobel wants nothing more than to take him in her arms.

“Of course not, baby.”

“But Daddy hits you!”

Mom looks around them, horrified. “Shush, Alex, not that loud! Your daddy doesn't hit me. He gets a bit angry sometimes, that's all.”

Alex searches her face, confused, but she sends him off to play with his brother and some other children. He's still close enough, though, to hear when an older man approaches his mother.

“Are things getting any better with Jesse?” he asks in a low tone.

Mom sighs. “I don't know how long I can hold it together. He's getting worse. Ever since Alex was born…”

“You need to get yourself out of there.”

“The boys need me, I can't just leave. And I can't take them with me, Jesse will do whatever it takes to keep them.”

Present-Alex sits up as the memory becomes to garbled to understand. “I'm not sure it even happened that way,” he says. “I didn't understand any of this, I just...I probably reconstructed this later.”

“What's the significance of the funeral?” Isobel asks.

“Nascha was killed by her white boyfriend,” Alex explains. “He beat her to death and dumped her in the desert. She wasn't found for weeks, because the authorities didn't bother to look for her, and he was never charged. I only know this because I looked it up a few years ago.”

“If your father had killed your mother, he probably wouldn't have faced any consequences,” Isobel understands.

“She knew that. He knew that. Just like we both knew he could have done anything to Michael. Michael was a homeless foster kid with no money. Mom was a depressed indigenous housewife. He had all the power.”

“So she just left you behind?”

Alex shrugs. “She saved herself. Dad wasn't physically abusive with us back then, and she was right. He'd have fought her for custody, and he'd have won.”

“Did she keep in contact at all?”

“At first, a little, but I think Dad discouraged her. After a while, she only called for our birthdays.”

Alex curls up on himself. That's not where she'll find his spark, Isobel figures. His mother is a sore subject, but one for another time. For now she needs to get him out of this apathy.

“What about friends?” she asks. “You were friends with Kyle as a child, weren't you?”

“Yeah,” Alex chuckles darkly. “For a while.”

*

“It will be too cold to come up here soon,” Alex says, letting his legs dangle off the edge of the wooden platform. He shivers a little and tugs at his sweater. It's early November, and the chill of winter is settling in, even in New Mexico.

Kyle hands him a protein bar from his backpack. “I brought food,” he says, scooting over so he's sitting beside Alex.

Alex just barely keeps himself from flinching when their elbows touch. It's only because it's so close to one of his bruises, he tells himself. He's not afraid of Kyle hitting him.

Their relationship has shifted, in the last few months. When they built the tree house this summer, they were the best of friends, together at every chance, sharing everything like they always have. As school started again, though, Kyle joined the football team and started hanging out with his new friends and less and less with Alex.

It started slowly, so slowly that Alex almost didn't notice. He understood Kyle sitting with the football team for lunch, he needed to integrate, after all. He thought the laughter around him, the conversations that stopped when he came into a room, the jokes were just his imagination, at first. His own growing realization about himself, the thing he'd only confessed to Kyle once, reluctantly, made him overly self-aware. No one else knew, they couldn't.

And yet, the insinuations grew more and more overt. Carson and his friends cornered Alex in the changing room once, and made it clear how disgusted they were to have to change in front of someone like him. Alex caught Kyle's sorry gaze as they stripped him, but he looked away quickly.

The next time, he laughed with the others. Alex stopped changing at school.

The insults and the looks never stop, though, and Kyle participates actively, now. Alex understands why Kyle doesn't want to be associated with him, even if the betrayal stings, but he could at least stay away.

“Wait,” Isobel raises her hands. “Kyle outed you at school?”

Alex shakes his head. “I don't think so. I never outright asked him, but even then it wasn't his style. It was probably one of my brothers, Dad didn't try to hide why he hated me.”

“But he participated in the bullying.”

“Yes. It got worse through the last couple of years of high school. Back then, we were still sort of friends,” Alex grimaces. “Not for long.”

“I heard there's a storm coming,” memory-Alex says, eating his protein bar absently. “We should have some way to check the weather up here. A barometer maybe? No, it wouldn't stand the humidity, it's not insulated enough.”

“You're such a dork,” Kyle teases.

Alex freezes. “What did you just say?”

“You're a dork! What? It's true! Everyone says it!”

“I don't like you calling me that,” Alex says.

Kyle rolls his eyes dismissively. “Come on! I can't make a joke around you anymore? Seriously?”

“Do you really think you can push me around at school and then come here and pretend we're friends?” Alex says through gritted teeth. He hasn't said anything before, too afraid to lose Kyle entirely, but he can't take it anymore.

“Hey, I don't like what those guys are doing to you, okay? But I can't do anything about it! Beside, you're not helping things by not standing up to them!”

Right. Of course it's all Alex's fault. “Oh yeah? What am I supposed to do, Kyle? Beat them up? In case you haven't noticed, no one's gonna take my side!”

“Then maybe you should have more friends!” Kyle sneers in return.

Alex snaps. “With friends like you, I might as well have none!”

“Fine. We're not friends, Alex, we never were, because you're a _freak_. I don't want to talk to you anymore.”

“Fine!” Alex shouts. “I don't want to talk to you either!”

He doesn't bother to go down the ladder and jumps straight off the platform. He's learned to take a fall long ago, so he just rolls in the fallen leaves, his eyes burning with tears.

*

“That was the last time we hung out,” Alex says. “It was a bad time. Dad was getting worse at home and school wasn't much better.”

“Didn't you have Liz and Maria?”

“Not yet, we only really became friends later. Kyle was my best and only friend through primary and middle school. It got better when I met them, though. Liz and Maria and Rosa...they taught me how to be a person, outside of what my father wanted me to be. Then I lost them too, when Rosa died.”

Isobel closes her eyes, shutting down her own guilt. She knows that it's not what Alex needs, right now. She's apologized, to him, to Rosa and Liz, she's tried to make things a little more right, and her guilt is her own. Alex shouldn't have to try to make _her_ feel better about it.

“Now Rosa's alive, and Liz and I are back,” Alex reflects. “And yet everything's different. We changed. _I_ changed.”

*

Alex sits on a bed Isobel doesn't recognize. The bedroom looks like that of a rebellious teenager, but it's not Alex's, and Alex doesn't look rebellious. There's no piercing yet, no make up, just the glint in his eyes.

“How old are you?” Isobel asks.

“About fifteen,” Alex answers.

Isobel feels the discomfort, the pain around the edges. She recognizes it, the way things feel when she's drunk a little too much acetone. He's cradling his left arm to his chest, the shoulder sore and swollen. He has a bruise low on his jaw.

“Please, Rosa,” he's saying. Isobel sees Rosa then, sitting in her desk chair−it's _her_ room−facing Alex, a tube of foundation in her hand. Liz has an arm around Alex's back, on his good side. Maria is sitting on the floor at his feet, her eyes worried. “I know how to do the bruises, but I want to learn to do my eyes.”

“Isn't that asking him to hurt you more?” Liz asks.

“I don't care about him,” Alex says. “He's going to hit me whatever I do. I want something for me.”

Isobel watches with a knot in her throat as Rosa shows Alex how to put on eyeliner, with regular input from the other girls. The mixture of uncertainty and pride in teenage Alex's eyes as he watches himself in the mirror, his eyes almost perfectly rimmed even if he did it one-handed, hurts inside. He doesn't seem to have a single memory that's untainted by fear and sadness.

The look in adult Alex is almost defiant, as they watch Rosa gently remove the make up from Alex's eyes, then hug him just as carefully.

“You get my bed since you're hurt,” she says. “I'll sleep on the floor, and Maria will sleep with Liz.”

“Are you sure it's okay if I stay?” Alex asks.

“Of course. You're always welcome here.”

“She's right,” Arturo Ortecho says from the corridor. Isobel turns around. Arturo and Mimi DeLuca are standing in the door frame, their smiles genuine but tight. “It's time to go to sleep, children. You have school in the morning.”

Isobel can feel the outpouring of gratitude coming from both teenage and adult Alex. She frowns. “They knew you were abused,” she says. “You don't even try to hide it. Why didn't they do anything?”

Alex blinks, and the memory fast-forwards. They can almost hear the _w_ _eeesh_ of a cassette, and it pulls a small smile out of Isobel. Nerd.

Mimi is watching Alex get under the covers of Rosa's bed, while Rosa settles on a mattress on the floor. “How's the shoulder?” she asks.

Alex smiles. “I'm okay, Mimi,” he says. “I swear.”

Isobel notes that he didn't answer about the specifics of his shoulder. Mimi seems to notice too, but she doesn't say anything. “Sleep well, Alex,” she says, backing out of the room. “You too, Rosa.”

She closes the door behind her, and everything is quiet for a moment. Suddenly, Alex slips out of bed and stands up. “I'm just going to get a glass of water,” he murmurs to Rosa, but Isobel catches his wince as he cradles his arm.

She follows him to the bathroom, and watches him pull what looks like over-the-counter painkillers out of the cabinet. He swallows them along with some water.

He tiptoes back to the bedroom, but he stops before walking in.

“Listen,” adult Alex whispers when Isobel looks around, confused.

Mimi and Arturo's voices are coming from beyond another closed door, to what Isobel assumes is the living room.

“I wish we could do more for him,” Mimi is saying.

“I know,” Arturo answers. “But we've been over this. No one would believe us above Jesse Manes, not when he has the sheriff in his pocket.”

“I grew up with those boys,” Mimi sighs, her voice pained. “Jesse was always stern, but not like that. He swore he wouldn't grow up to be like his father. I thought−”

“We can only pray that Alex will be strong enough to get away and heal from this,” Arturo says. “And until then, offer what little support we can.”

Teenage Alex has tears running down his face when he slips back into Rosa's bedroom. Adult Alex shakes his head. “I wasn't strong enough,” he says.

Isobel chokes on her words. “You were, Alex. You had so much against you.”

“Then why didn't I just run away?”

“We both know that's not how it works.”

Alex closes his eyes. “They put more faith in me than they should have, though. I was never strong enough to get away.”

_*_

Alex is turning twenty years old today, and he's sitting in his childhood bedroom.

He doesn't even know how he ended up back here. He was shipped back from Afghanistan three days ago, and somehow he made his way back to Roswell, when he'd sworn to himself that he'd never set foot here again.

The last two years, before his tour, have been liberating. Without his father's constant presence over his shoulder, Alex has got his feet under him and he's making _something_ of his life, even if it's not what he wanted for himself. He's found the things that he excels at and honed them so well that he's starting the Academy in the fall with a new specialization. He was the best of his class in every subject in basic training, and he's found out that not all of it is thanks to his father.

He never stopped, never gave himself the time to mourn the life that he dreamed of or thought about what it really means to be an Airman, until Afghanistan hammered it home.

The walls of his bedroom are closing in on him.

“I'm going out,” he tells no one in particular, making his way out of the house as quickly as possible. He is _not_ having one of his stupid episodes where his father might find him.

It started halfway through his tour, when he came so close to getting his head shot off that he heard the bullets whistle in his ear. It wasn't his first skirmish with insurgents, but it was the first where he got to see them up close. When he got to see the light go out in the eyes of a keffieh-covered man from a bullet he fired and pulled his scarf away to find a boy who looked just like him. The same sun-darkened skin, the same youth on his face, the same terrified gaze.

Alex closes his eyes and rests his back on the wall of a bus stop. The air around him feels thick, making his movements sluggish and his breathes painful. Lifeless eyes stare at him from behind his eyelids. He opens his eyes again in panic, and looks down the street, hoping against hope that no one saw him.

He has to get this under control before he reports back to Colorado Springs.

“Alex? Oh my God, it is you!”

Alex flinches and turns around, only to be met by the hundred and thirty pounds of Maria DeLuca launching herself at him. He has to fight with himself not to throw her to the floor with his hand on her carotid.

“How are you? How long have you been in Roswell? What are you doing here? Why didn't you tell me?” Maria rapid-fires questions without giving him time to answer. Alex gently pushes her away after the shortest possible socially-acceptable hug and crosses his arms over his chest.

“Hi, Maria,” he says, mustering up a smile. “I'm glad to see you.”

“Alex,” Maria chides. “We've known each other for too long for you to just greet me like that.” She narrows her eyes. “You're not okay. You need...space, which I'm not giving you right now. Sorry.” She takes a step back.

“Thanks,” Alex murmurs, finding his footing again. He'd forgotten what it feels like to be close to Maria DeLuca.

Maria's eyes widen. “It's your birthday,” she realizes. “Happy birthday, Alex. I want to hug you again, but that's not what you want, so I won't.”

Alex smiles weakly.

“I have...” Maria checks her watch. “Three hours until I have to be at the bar. Mama can probably handle things for a little while longer. I was going to Walmart, but it can wait.” She looks around them, and her gaze pauses on the Manes' house. “Will you come to my place to chat? I'm sure you have stories.”

Alex hesitates, then nods. It's much better than going back inside, and it beats wandering around town aimlessly until night falls.

Maria extends a hand, telegraphing her moves, and lets him chose whether to take it. Alex decides to chance it, and her touch doesn't make his skin crawl, not when he's forewarned. He follows her to the apartment above the Wild Pony that Maria shares with her mother.

Two hours later, Maria has managed to make him spill his guts on everything from his admission to the Air Force Academy−“I'm so proud of you, Alex!”−to his relationship status−nothing to see there, it's not like he's allowed to have a sexuality−but he's refused to say anything about why he was having an anxiety attack at a bus stop at three in the afternoon on a weekday. Maria is perceptive enough to skirt around it and still make him say more than he intended to, but there are some things he's just not ready to share.

Inadvertently or not, though, she's got him primed for a meltdown. Maybe because she brought up Rosa and cried over their dead friend for half an hour−it's still raw for Alex too. He never got to grieve for her. Or maybe because Mimi came up on her short break and hugged him tight, with such a sad look in her eyes that Alex had to look away.

“How does it feel to turn twenty?” Maria asks. Her own birthday is in a month, so she's still nineteen. Neither of them is actually allowed to drink in the bar she's now co-running, but here in the apartment, she takes out a bottle of tequila to celebrate. Mimi has never tried to forbid Maria to drink, figuring that she's do it whether she was allowed to or not, with the time she spends around alcohol anyway.

Alex stares into space. He's been asking himself that all day, and there's only one answer coming to his mind. “I shouldn't be alive,” he says.

“What do you mean?” Maria frowns. When he takes too long to answer, she puts a hand on his arm, worried. “Alex, what do you mean? Did something happen overseas? Is that what you're talking about?”

Alex shakes his head. “No. Well, yes, but it's just… I never thought I'd live to twenty.”

He didn't mean to tell Maria that, but although this is by no mean the first time he drinks, he doesn't hold his alcohol too well.

“Alex−”

“I thought...I thought he'd have killed me by then. Or that I'd have cut my wrists or something. Over there, I thought it was it a couple times, but−”

Maria looks horrified. “Alex, you can't say that!”

Right. He forgets sometimes, the shock on other people's face. In the Air Force, he thought he'd found kindred spirits a few times, people who'd know what he meant, but they all thought he was twisted and weird. At least they didn't usually hold it against him.

“Sorry, just...forget it,” he says.

“Alex, are you thinking about that? Killing yourself?”

There are a couple of chef knives in the kitchen drawer, and baring that, he could probably smash their shot glasses and get sharp enough shards.

“No,” Alex lies. He doesn't even know if it's really a lie. He won't do it, he knows he won't, so what's the harm in having an imagination?

“Do you think your father wants to kill you?”

Alex hasn't had Jesse Manes's hand around his neck in two years, but he can still feel the imprint.

“No.”

Maria sighs. “Okay. You scared me for a moment there,” she says, but Alex can tell she's not really letting this go. “But maybe you should...talk to someone? I don't know, I don't know how to help, but−”

“I'm fine,” Alex says. “This was just...a thought I had. Back when...when things were really bad, with _him_ , I thought I wouldn't make it out. I'm just realizing that I have.”

Or has he?

“Okay, okay,” Maria nods, tension leaving her body bit by bit. “I love you, you know that?”

Alex nods, staring through the window.

He's twenty years old, and he doesn't understand how he's still alive.

*

He's twenty eight, and he doesn't understand _why_ he's still alive.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is it. This is the last chapter of this part. It's nearly twice as long as the other chapters, and it's was hella rough to write, but it's there.
> 
> Specific warnings: suicide ideation, suicide attempt (those two are really serious and graphic throughout the chapter), death, war, child abuse, overdose, panic attack, eating disorder, injuries, mentions of torture, mentions of bullying.

Alex's pantry is empty, and the solitude is becoming more than he can handle.  Or perhaps more accurately, the lack of a mission to complete. He lies in bed with no purpose, and even Buffy can't wake him out of his a pathy . It's been seven days since  his father died, and he's surprised himself at least a dozen times thinking about how many painkillers it would take to fall into a stupor he wouldn't wake up from.

According to his calculations, about half as many as it would have taken four months ago.

He's not sure why that wakes him up more than the daydream itself, but he throws on a pair of sweatpants and two hoodies on top of each other and grabs his largest backpack.

It's later than he thought, night falling as he drives all the way into town. The supermarket is mostly empty, and Alex drags himself through the aisles on autopilot, grabbing his usual brands. He's probably not going to eat any of this, anyway. He can barely bring himself to look at the food he puts in his backpack.

A store clerk takes pity on him, seeing him struggle to juggles his crutches and his backpack at the same time. “Sir, can I help you?”

Alex just shakes his head,  words refusing to get out of his mouth. Unfortunately, the clerk doesn't back off. “You're that Airman who was injured, right? There was a parade for you, I was there,” she says, coming even closer−too close, close enough that Alex can move away without risking to tumble or knock something off the aisle. 

“Thank you for your service,” she goes on. Alex tries a grimace he hopes can pass as a thank you. “My brother's also serving, he's in Iraq right now.”

Oh. So she's looking for reassurance  that her brother will be better off than Alex. Or she's trying to form some random social connection, Alex can't even tell. Chatting with a stranger is well beyond him right now.

He's hyperventilating, because of course someone crowding him would send him right into a panic attack−he's just that weak, right? “ Sir, are you alright?”

_No, I'm dying._ It's not even true. He wishes it was, for a moment. That he could just panic himself into asphyxiating altogether.  H e nods and leans against the pasta shel ves to catch his breath. 

“Do you need help? Is there something wrong?” The poor clerk is panicking too at this point−she's young, barely in her twenties, and she doesn't know how to handle a sick customer. Not that Alex is sick, but he still can't bring himself to stand up straight and carry on. “'m fine,” he just barely manages to crow out. “Stay away.”

“Oh,” the clerk mutters. “Of course, sir, I'm sorry.” She seems to be catching on. “I...I'll be over there if you need any help, okay?”

Alex thanks the heavens that she's not the type of person who would insist on calling an ambulance and checking his pulse or something. “ My brother's best friend is a vet with PTSD,” she explains−her voice is further away, and Alex can finally breathe a little. “I should have realized. I'm sorry. I'm going to bring you chair to sit down, alright?”

As she walks away, Alex realizes dimly that he's holding onto his crutches for dear life, and his hands are starting to really hurt. He forces himself to unclench them, finger by finger−it's a good way to focus his brain on something other that the panic.  The shelves are digging into his back painfully, and his leg is on fire from standing on it for so long. 

The pain bring him back to his body, slowly, enough that when the clerk comes back with a neon green plastic chair, he can almost smile at her.

“Thank you,” he murmurs hoarsely, lowering himself down. “Sorry.”

“It's okay.” She crouches down to be on his level. “My name is Clara. If you've got everything you need in there, I can check it out for you while you rest,” she points to his backpack, still awkwardly hanging from Alex's left wrist, tangled in the crutch's cuff.

A lex is briefly overwhelmed by her kindness, and just as quickly smothered by a wave of shame. What is he doing here? She deserves better than to have to deal with his bullshit.

“Thank you,” he repeats, shaking his arm to get his bag off. The crutch clatters to the floor and Clara scrambles to pick it up. Alex grits his teeth. He has no better option right now. He can't just leave the bag and run away.

“Just stay here, I'll come get you when I'm done, alright? Do you need anything else?”

Alex shakes his head mutely.  He takes a moment to breathe deeply, calling on all the calming exercises he's learned over the years, and he picks himself up and heads toward the checkout counters.  Clara is putting his items back into his backpack when he make it to hers.

“Thank you, you didn't have to do that,” he tells her, his voice quiet but finally steady.

“Oh, you're here! Will you be okay from here? Or do you want me to carry it outside? It would really be no trouble.”

“I'm good,” Alex makes himself smile, trying to get past the shame. She watches him lean his crutches on the counter to get the bag on his shoulders with a concerned but supporting frown. “Thank you, Clara.”

He still has one more stop to make, at the pharmacy next door, but he seriously considers just giving up.  He needs the meds though, as he's run out of painkillers despite rationing them as much as his body will handle.

As Alex enters the pharmacy, Isobel catches the fleeting, tiny bit of hope that she'd be there, arguing with the pharmacist like she was weeks ago. She shudders.

She has a feeling that it's about as close as Alex will ever get to a cry for help.

Present-Alex notices−of course he does. “Yeah. I think that's why I let Kyle call you.”

His disappointment, however slight, is crushing. The pharmacist is alone, and he barely looks at Alex as he hands him his pill bottles. Alex's eyes linger on them for a moment too long, as he slides his arm out of the crutch to put them in his pocket. The rattle of the pills makes him shudder just a little, in _want_ , _need_. Pain relief. Unconsciousness. He wants to lie down and leave the world behind, and maybe… _No_ , he shakes his head. _You tried that once._

Thankfully t he pharmacist doesn't try to make conversation, and there's no issue with the prescription−Alex doesn't think he could have handled any other unforeseen event. He lets out a discreet breath of relief as he make his way back to his car.

The relief is short-lasting.

“Alex! It's been a while!” It's Maria, waving at him from the other end of the parking lot. She make it to him in a few strides.

“Busy,” Alex answers with a forced smile. “I had some things to take care of.”

“I heard about your father,” Maria says. “I'm sorry. I know you two were...” she waves vaguely. “But I'm sorry.”

Alex nods, unable to say anything to that.

“Are you okay?” Maria asks. The concern in her voice is genuine, as she looks down at his leg.

“I'm fine,” he forces a smile again, and it's even harder this time.

Once, Maria would have noticed right away. Tonight, she just frowns slightly and shakes her head, as if to get rid of a thought. “I was just heading home,” she says, nodding to the bag in her hand. “You wanna come for a bit to catch up?”

Alex bites his lip. He doesn't have the energy for this. Not even close. “Where's Guerin?” he asks, allowing himself to be just a little petty.

“We broke up. Today, actually,” and just like that there are tears in Maria's eyes, and Alex's resolve crumbles.

He closes his eyes. “Oh, Maria. I'm sorry.”

It's not even a lie. He wouldn't wish pain on his friend for anything, and he knows too well the pain of losing Michael. If it hurts her even a fraction of…

He steels himself, both physically and mentally, and hugs her. He orchestrates it so her arms stay above his shoulders−there's no need for her to feel his ribs, he knows she'd worry about that−and hates himself for even thinking about that. The wrongness of it all makes his skin crawl, and touching her skin makes him want to claw out of his.

Thankfully, he doesn't have anything in his stomach to throw up.

“I don't want to be alone,” Maria whispers in his ear.

Alex nods. “I'll follow you to the Pony,” he says. “We can have a few drinks.”

*

“That's the night you were assaulted,” Isobel finally recognizes. She hadn't put the timeline fully together until now, with how scrambled Alex's memories of that night are.

Alex just nods. Jarringly, when the memory fades, the desert doesn't reappear around them. They're in Alex's bedroom at the cabin instead. Isobel looks around her in confusion, wondering if she somehow dropped the mindspace without wanting to, but she hasn't. This place still has the distorted edges of any mindscape, the limits of human vision and memory. Alex is back on the bed, huddled under the covers, but his skin is pink and healthy, his body in shape. There is no IV bag hanging from the headboard, or empty bottles of acetone on the nightstand.

“Did you come back here on purpose?” she asks Alex.

“No,” Alex murmurs. “I'm tired.”

“Oh, Alex,” Isobel sighs. She's tired too. She's exhausted, in fact. She's on her third bottle of acetone in a few hours, and her body is ready to give up. She may well have been the one to take them back here, she realizes, if Alex's mind didn't provide a mindscape to go back to. It's always easier to just mirror reality. “We can take another break if you want.”

They've been at this for three days, now. Isobel stayed at the cabin the last two, relieving Kyle who had to go to work, and Alex still hasn't eaten anything or moved from the bed. The only thing keeping him alive at this point is the IV nutrition Kyle set him up with.

“Yeah, okay,” Alex mutters. “I don't know what there is left to do, anyway. It's like nothing helps.”

“We've made progress,” Isobel says firmly. “Maybe you can't feel it yet, but I can. It's in...I don't know, the shape of your mind. I don't have the words to explain, but it's more...alive than it was.”

Alex bites his lip and lies back, closing his eyes. “Take the time you need,” he says. “This is taking so much out of you too.”

“Don't you dare tell me you're not worth it again,” Isobel threatens. “But okay, I'll go take a nap. Don't go anywhere.”

Alex laughs weakly. “Don't worry about that. Oh, let Buffy in before you leave?”

Isobel smiles as she pulls away from his mind. This is the first time Alex has really shown an interest in anyone or anything for himself. He's made sure that she and Kyle take care of his dog properly, but he hasn't asked to see her at all. She'll take that as a win. A first step.

The little dog whines sadly when Isobel steps out of the bedroom, rubbing her head against Isobel's chin, then yaps in excitement when she's let inside. “Careful, Buffy,” Isobel calls after her.

“I can handle her,” Alex rasps out, reaching out for her. “We'll be fine, go sleep.”

Isobel obeys and closes the door behind her.

Lying down on the bed of the guest bedroom, however, she can't find sleep. She's e xhausted , but her mind is too stimulated still. She tries to take stock instead, going back over everything she's seen of Alex's memories.

She's not a trained therapist. She's acutely aware of this, now more than ever. She looked up many things while she was trying to heal from what Noah did to her, and more in the last few days, whenever she took a break, but it's simply not enough. There's no such thing as a mind healer−the mind is a domain where Max's abilities don't apply, only hers, and she's no healer.

No, Alex's mind will have to heal on its own. What it needs is to be given the chance. From what she's seen, he's never had a break, never had a moment where he could do anything more than survive what the world threw at him. His brain has been stuck in survival mode for so long that, now that it's no longer necessary, that Alex and the people he loves are safe, it's destroying itself trying to use coping mechanisms built for literal battlefields.

Prominent at the center of it all is the lack of importance Alex  grants to his own life. He's been raised to thing that he is worthless as a person, that his wants and needs don't matter, and the belief is deeply anchored. He doesn't think that he deserves to take up space.

He doesn't think he deserves to live. And more than that, Isobel finally puts her finger on what has been bothering her, he's not at all sure that he  _wants_ to live.

Gasping, she sits up brutally. It's been there all along, but it's taken her this long to put it into words. The suicidal thoughts. Alex asked her for help because he knows this is one of his last options, but he's really hanging on by a thread. He's dying, and part of him is welcoming it with open arms. His mind goes to it often, it has for a long time, she can tell. Those aren't just fleeting thoughts and aimless contemplation.

There can be no healing, Isobel realizes, if he  can't see the point in living.

She forces herself to lie back down, and she eventually drifts off, her limbs heavy and her thoughts heavier. She really doesn't know if she's up to the task.

*

Alex looks almost as sick in the mindspace as in the physical world.  It still looks like his bedroom, light barely coming through the shuttered windows, though the air isn't as stale here.

“Can I lie down?” Isobel asks, motioning to the empty side of the bed. It won't change anything to her tiredness, but she feels like seeing what Alex sees right now, really being on his level, will help the hard conversation they're gearing for.

Alex makes space for her, then offers her half of the blankets once she's next to him. Isobel hasn't laid this close to anyone since Noah, but Alex is safe in a way even h er brothers aren't. Not because he's gay, but because she's plunged so deep into his mind that she can't even imagine him hurting her, now.  Buffy is lying down at the foot of the bed, watching them.

“Maybe you can't help me,” Alex murmurs. “Not enough for it to matter. You're at the end of your rope, I can feel it. You're going to have to go back to your life soon, and you'll have to let me go.”

“I'm not letting you die, Alex. We've come this far, I'm not going to let go until we're done.”

“We'll never be done,” Alex says. “You know this. Even if...it's not going to go away.”

Isobel bites her lip, and turns to her side so she can face him. “You're going to struggle with this for the rest of your life. The depression, the anxiety, the eating disorder, maybe they won't go away anymore than your chronic pain or phantom limb or everything else. But I want you to live. Life is still worth it, Alex. It always is.”

“Is it?”

“I wanted to ask...I caught a stray thought earlier.” _You've tried that once,_ she shows him. The pills, the pharmacy. “It's not the first time. You think about suicide often.”

Alex sighs. “Yeah. I have for as long as I can remember.  It's just...thoughts. I don't plan on doing it.”

“Do you _want_ to die?”

Alex averts his eyes and shrugs. “What I want doesn't matter,” he says.

It's like an echo.  _What I want doesn't matter,_ he told Michael, too.  He told himself that so many times, over the years.

“Yeah, it does,” Isobel says softly. “It matters.”

Alex chokes on his breath, his eyes suddenly wet. With a groan of pain, he curls up on himself.

No one's ever told him that, Isobel realizes. She reaches out and hugs him against her body, their tears mixing.

*

_You're a freak_ keeps repeating in his mind.  _Unnatural_ , his father said.  His father said  _you don't deserve to eat at my table_ then force-fed him when Alex passed out at school and the nurse said he wasn't eating enough. It's all about appearances, Alex knows that. His father can't  show the world that he has a defective son.

A lex lies on his bed, in his and Flint's impersonal, cold bedroom. There's nothing on the wall on his side, and Flint only has a signed football framed poster above his bed, no other decoration anywhere. The beds are made with military corners and there isn't a single object cluttering their narrow desks. It's a good summary for his life, Alex thinks. Empty and numb is all he can feel.

School is as boring as ever, but now that Kyle won't give him the time of the day, Alex is fully alone. Anyone who has ever talked to him now sneers and jabs at him, following the popular kids. Everyone knows he's gay, not that Alex really knows it for himself. The only real feeling he has is pain from the blows he gets every time he so much as looks at a guy for too long.

Things are steadily getting worse with his father. Gregory left the house at the beginning of the school year for basic, and it's only Flint and Alex left, now. Flint has football and friends and he's out of the house more than he's in−Dad doesn't mind, as long as he does his chores and his training. Alex doesn't have friends to hang out with. Dad now has him account for every minute of his days,  and if he's in a bad mood, he'll take off his belt for something as small as staying behind at school for fifteen minutes to speak to a teacher.

Sighing, Alex slips his hand under the mattress, and curls his fingers around the small bottle there. Dad is still at work, so this is one of his rare moments of peace. He used to listen to music or read books, but he doesn't have the energy for that anymore. Even his favorite bands don't hold any appeal anymore.

Absently, he pulls the pill bottle out. As always, the rattle calms his thoughts. It feels...safe.

He's never tried to take any of the pills. He salvaged the bottle from the medicine cabinet a long time ago, before he even understood what it was, for one reason: his mother's name on the bottle. Dad threw out everything his mother left behind, after she left in a hurry with just a change of clothes and her handbag. There's only a handful of things Alex could hang onto, a few pieces of jewelry and a coat that still fits him, though he'll never be able to wear it in front of Dad, and the pill bottle.

Alex looked up the label−Ativan−a while ago, and he knows what the pills are for. He longs for one, sometimes, just to be able to sleep, to quiet down the spiraling thoughts, but he's too scared to actually try.

Or is he? What's the worse that can happen? His father's  punishment wouldn't be worse than the beating he gave Alex for going out to the tree house to talk with Kyle. Dad beats him o ver any little thing anyway, so what's one more time? Maybe the pills could take the edge off, at least. Make the wait bearable. Soothe the ache in his chest−cracked ribs, according to what he could look up on Google. 

And maybe, if he takes enough of them…

Flint is the one who finds him. Alex wonders for a long time, afterwards, if Dad would have bothered calling an ambulance if he'd found him.

*

“Fuck,” Isobel murmurs, opening her eyes in the cabin again. Her head feels woozy from the second-hand pill haze, the memory still vivid in Alex.

“It was a particularly poor attempt,” Alex says. “The psychiatrist told my father it was more of a cry for help. I told her I just wanted to try the pills, that I didn't mean it, and she believed me.”

“Did your father?” Isobel asks.

Alex laughs darkly. “Dad made me run the obstacle course until I collapsed every day for the next three months. Then he bought me a gun and took me to the shooting range.”

“You attempted suicide and he bought you a _gun_?”

“His own twisted way of telling me that if I wanted to do it again, I should at least do it like a man,” Alex shrugs.

Isobel shuts her eyes tight, repulsed by the very thought of a father doing that to his child.

“It worked, but not the way he thought,” Alex adds. “That's when I started to rebel. I decided that if he didn't care if I died, then I would live to be everything he hated.”

“So you started wearing makeup and got your nose pierced. How very...adolescent of you,” Isobel makes a poor attempt at humor.

“If I'd really been serious about dying, I'd have thought it through,” Alex says. “I'd gone to a place no one would find me, I'd have actually looked up how many pills I needed to take.”

“You would now,” Isobel says. She can't believe she's seriously discussing means of suicide, but it seems important to Alex. “But you were thirteen.”

“What I mean is, I didn't plan it. Not really.”

“Okay,” Isobel murmurs, for lack of something better to say. She's at a loss. The memory hit her too close to home, while also being far enough removed from her own experience that she doesn't know what to give Alex. Comfort isn't good enough, not against those thoughts.

Not against the utter lack of  _hope_ in his mind.

She takes hold of his hand and squeezes it.

“Was it the only time?” she asks.

“It was the only time I attempted. The first time I saw myself die. Not just thought about it, but came within an inch of it.”

“What were the other times?” Isobel asks, because she feels that that's where his mind is going.

“When I was injured,” Alex gestures vaguely to his leg. And once during my second tour. We were supposed to infiltrate the command center of an insurgent faction and hack into their system, but we got bad intel. They were warned we were coming.”

*

“Javis, Herman, clear the corridor,” the Captain orders. “Manes, the server room should be right there, I'll clear it and you go in.”

A lex nods, tightening his hands on his machine gun. He's second-in-command on this mission, but more than that, he's  at  the center of their strategy:  he needs to put his training to good use and get into the insurgents' computer network before they realize the intrusion.

H e waits until the Captain has cleared the room and sets to work. The computer is an older unit, slower than Alex would like as he bypasses the password and goes right into the drive. All the data is encrypted and nothing gets out of the internal network, which is the reason of this whole mission. It can only be accessed from here.

He loses himself in the work for a few minutes, before he hears a commotion outside.  He tenses, readying himself, but he really needs another two minutes at least to crack the encryption, and probably five after that to copy the data. He's not going to get them, he understands as he hears the Captain cry out and something hit the closed door.

His fingers fly on the keyboard, but he finds himself with no choice but to stop  as the door flies open. He grabs his gun and stands up, and he's met by five armed men, who quickly circle him before he has a chance to open fire.

For one instant, Alex has a three-way choice. A bad choice, whichever option he goes for. He can lower his gun and surrender, and he'll get captured, tortured, and probably killed. He can open fire, and he'll be riddled with bullets before he knows it , and at the mercy of his enemy if he doesn't die right away . Or, if he's quick enough, he can turn his gun on himself  now , rather than risk capture and interrogation.

O nly one of those choices guarantees the safety of the intel in his head that cannot go into enemy hands. 

He doesn't make it.

Alex will spend days wondering, later, what stopped him from pull ing the trigger.  Was it hope? Or was it just fear? Is he a nothing but a coward?

The gun is roughly pulled from him as he spreads his arms in surrender, and he's pushed to his knees.  His wrists are bound with zip ties behind his back, so tight that he immediately feels them cut the blow flow, and  they pull a hood over his head.

He's in their hands for twenty-eight hours before the rest of his team finds him.

Alex comes out with a few broken ribs, two missing nails and too many bruises to count, but he's fine. He's fine when they keep him up for hours to debrief him and check that he didn't break down and spill out the intel. He's perfectly fine when they take him to the base's infirmary to check him up and give him a week of rest and something to sleep. He wakes up screaming three times that night, and has to bite down on his pillow for four months, but it's nothing new. He's fine.

Food tastes like ashes. No, like gunpowder. He daydreams of putting his gun in his mouth every time he cleans it. He replays that second, over and over.

None of his superiors call him out for not making the right decision. It's kinda hard, to look someone in the eyes, and tell them _you should have blown your brains out_. But Alex can hear it in every order, see it in every look.

Herman didn't make it. The Captain didn't make it, and died feet away from Alex on the other side of that door, trying to protect him and the mission. And it was all for nothing, since Alex didn't manage to get the files they needed.

But he made it out. He made it out and he shouldn't have.

Why does he feel so guilty for surviving?

*

Isobel recognizes the desert, visible only through a hole in the wall of the collapsed building. The sky above is a brilliant blue, the sun brutal and unforgiving.

Alex feels what little energy he still has quickly seep away from his body. His brain constantly goes from one extreme to the other, one second terrified that if he passes out, he probably won't wake up again, and the next welcoming, almost hungrily waiting for, the end of the pain. He can't take anymore of it.

He doesn't know how long it's been. Long. He's passed out at least three times already, and woken in increasingly worse conditions.  His leg is pinned down and he can't move his head, and he's slowly choking from the d ust going into his lungs.

And there's Karl's body, still close to him, too close, too cold. Alex cries, a lot, until he goes numb. He's going to die here. He has no doubt in his mind that he's going to die, and yet his body is hanging on. The primal panic in him every time he feels his eyes close on their own is pure instinct, because there's no fight, no energy left to draw on.

Finally, w ith the very last of his strength, A lex exhales and squeezes Karl's cold hand. But it's not Karl he's thinking about in that moment. It's Michael.

Alex will never get a chance to see him again. Not that he ever thought he would, but near death has a way of rearranging your priorities. And apparently after all these years, Alex's priority is still Michael.

He closes his eyes with Michael's young, beautiful face behind his eyelids.

He's long out, by the time Javis finally finds him. He doesn't wake up until days later, in a hospital in Germany.

He doesn't feel alive again until eight months later.

“Alex,” Michael breathes, then he turns bitter. “Back from Baghdad. Your father must be proud. Finally a real Manes man.”

*

Present-Alex lets out a sob. He lets the memory play out, Michael's biting words and the way Alex couldn't take his eyes off his face, cataloging all the changes, feeding his soul.

“He was a dick,” Isobel sneers, because it's the only thing she knows how to deal with.

She's shaking. Alex is shaking. He cries still, his emotions finally breaking through the apathy. He cries uncontrollably now, his mind fully anchored into reality again.

They've pulled him back from the dissociative state he was stuck in. Isobel hopes that it's progress, as Alex's body is wracked with sobs.

“You made it through all this, Alex,” Isobel murmurs, hugging him tightly. “You survived.”

“But what's−what's the point?” Alex stammers.

“You're still here. We only have one shot at this, you know. At life. We don't get a repeat performance, or a second try, just the once. We have to make the most of it. You're still _alive_.”

*

The downside to spending so much time learning how to kill other people is that you understand exactly how easy it would be to kill yourself. Alex can't help it, these days. Every time he walks into a new place, along with the exit routes and the potential threats, his mind will catalog all the possible ways he could harm himself.

He can name two dozen ways to end his own life in the cabin alone, that don't even involve his gun or Jim Valenti's hunting shotguns. He's not afraid of pain. On the contrary, pain is an old friend.

And yet, however often he's thought of it, he doesn't do anything. He's killing himself through neglect. He's not even doing it on purpose.

Alex is lying on his bed, just like in the physical world, and the first thing Isobel notices is pain.

She's hasn't been feeling it in his memories, not really, only echoes of it. She's not sure if it's because it doesn't really imprint into memories, the same way they're often missing smells and tastes, or if her shield is weakened here when the mindspace so closely connects to reality. She's not sure they're entirely in the mindspace at all. She can feel her own body and Alex's both, interlaced on the bed, their tears mixing on the soaked sheets.

A lex's leg burns and crackles and throbs. It's up there with some of the worst pain Isobel has ever felt, in the limb that isn't even there, in the infected stump, the barest touch of the sheets against the skin unbearable. The stabbing pain from his ribs, the old ache in his neck and shoulder, the constant headache barely register.

It doesn't let up. It's the pain of a bad day, made worse by the state of Alex's body, and the only painkillers he can still take without putting himself in danger−Tylenol and cortisone−barely cut it down. It drowns out thoughts and sensations and desires, everything that isn't the overwhelming  _need_ for it to stop.

“It hurts,” Isobel chokes up.

“It hurts,” Alex confirms, his hands too weak to really dig into her back. “I want it to stop.”

“I know. But dying is not the answers.”

“Isn't it? Nothing else works,” Alex breathes.

Isobel brings their foreheads together.

“If you stop the pain, you stop everything else, too,” she murmurs.

“Would it really be so bad?”

*

There's Buffy, still lying at the foot of the bed, keeping guard over Alex. His foot is tangled in her fur, and she leans into it.

“She trusts you,” Isobel says. “She counts on you.”

_I can't give her what she needs_. Alex doesn't answer verbally, but it's there all the same.

“She loves you.”

Alex cries.

*

There's the steady, unmovable determination in Isobel's eyes. The sad, pleading undertone in Kyle's voice.

If Alex dies today, they will miss him. Someone in the world will hurt because he's gone.

It's a new thought, one that tears at Alex's heart. He doesn't want to hurt anymore people.

But isn't he hurting them more by hanging on? By making them worry and feel guilty? He's a waste of space.

“You're not,” Isobel says. “We love you. I love you, Alex.” Her voice breaks. Alex sobs harder.

Isobel has uncontrollable tears running down the sides of her face and into the pillow. “You're so strong,” she murmurs.

Alex frowns. “I'm not strong.”

“Yes you are. You're been through _so_ much. It's incredible that you made it this far.”

“I can't−I don't even have control over my body. Or my mind. I'm not strong, Isobel.”

Isobel strokes his cheek, trying to catch his eyes. “You had so much against you. You're beautiful, Alex. So fucking beautiful and strong. I've been in your mind for three days, and I can barely take the intensity of it. I've never seen a mind like yours.”

Alex sobs.

“Thank you,” Isobel continues. “Thank you for allowing me to see all this. It was supposed to help you, but it's given me so much. There's so much pain, but there's also beauty. You're willing to do anything for the people you love, to give them everything.”

“I wish it was enough,” Alex murmurs.

“Some things are not yours to give, Alex. You've already given too much.”

“I just want to…”

“To what?” Isobel probes at his hesitation. “To atone for existing? For taking up space?”

Alex swallows.

“This space is yours. There's nothing to atone for. You have people who love you, Alex. It doesn't just go one way.”

She pushes it this time, gives him the hints. Liz. Maria. Mimi. Arturo. Kyle. Rosa. Herself. Buffy.

_Michael_ .

Alex shakes his head against hers. “I can't be good for them.”

“You don't have to always be good, Alex. You just have to be you.”

“I'm not worth it.”

“You are,” Isobel murmurs. “To me, to them, you are worth everything.”

She holds his hand tight, her other hand still stroking his cheek, as he weeps.

She can feel the little bit of consciousness that is Alex already seep into the whole. Not the way she connects to other people, walking the whole until she finds someone's presence. The way she felt Rosa seep out of her body, ten years ago, the only thing she remembered of that night until s he took Liz's antido te . The way consciousness goes back to feed the whole when someone dies. 

S he brushes his hair out of his face, looking at him.

“What do you want?” she asks.

Budding flowers on the windowsill of the cabin, spring well underway, the sun just rising. Perfectly sharpened pencils in the pen holder, the speakers blasting out 90s music. The feel of the septum ring tickling just a little under his nose, a memory untainted.

“What I want doesn't matter,” Alex mutters.

A kiss, in a darkened room. Isobel has seen it before. It keeps coming back. Orbiting lights, blue and green and pink and purple.

“What do you want?” she repeats.

Alex swallows. He's back on the bed, buried under the covers, his b ody limp in Isobel's  arms , just like they will find themselves back in the bedroom if they blink.

“I don't want to die,” he murmurs. His voice is raw and empty and hollow.

But there's a hint, here. They can work from that.

“What do you want?” Isobel pushes.

The dark eyes search her, as if Alex is trying to suck his motivation from her body. He can't lie, here. He can't tell her what she wants to hear.

He licks at parched lips. His little finger twitches against Isobel's palm.

“I want to live.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was so much longer and so much bigger than I ever anticipated. I set out months ago to write something fairly short, and it turned into a monster.
> 
> Thank you so much to everyone who read through to the end, and especially to everyone who encouraged me, left comments or kudos. It was a really hard story to write, however cathartic, and I wouldn't have made it to the end without you. Special thanks to InsidiousIntent and eveningspirit for handholding and brainstorming with me whenever I needed it.
> 
> I need a break from this story, but I really want to come back with the second part soon. It will be less angsty, but will put the other characters face to face with their contradictions and look closely at the beginning of Alex's recovery, and it will be called _heaving through corrupted lungs (troubled by the emptiness)_. If you want to be warned when it is posted, you can subscribe to the series (rather than this story).

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on [Tumblr](https://emma-arthur.tumblr.com/) if you want to chat!


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